


World Revolution War

by ninemoons42



Category: Shoujo Kakumei Utena | Revolutionary Girl Utena, X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Age Difference, Alternate Reality, Alternate Universe - Fusion, Alternate Universe - High School, Alternate Universe - Teenagers, Bullying, Canonical Character Death, Crossdressing, Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, Doppelganger, Duelling, Gen, Genderplay, M/M, Non-Consensual Kissing, Orphans, Past Abuse, Physical Abuse, Suicidal Thoughts, Swordfighting, Teenaged Erik, Underage Kissing, Underage Sex, Underage Suicidal Thoughts, past emotional/psychological abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-06
Updated: 2013-09-06
Packaged: 2017-12-25 19:50:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 26,407
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/956962
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninemoons42/pseuds/ninemoons42
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After being orphaned as a child, the only things left to Erik Lehnsherr are a memory of being alive and being loved, and a strange rose signet ring that had belonged to his mother. Eventually that ring leads him to a strange school, where students fight duels with live steel for a great but mysterious prize, and finds himself pulled not just toward the idea of something called World Revolution, but also into the orbit of a boy known as the Rose Groom.</p><p>(Or: X-Men: First Class meets an AU of Revolutionary Girl Utena.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	World Revolution War

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lady_date](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lady_date/gifts).



> Work marked as Underage for the ages of most of the characters.
> 
> Work marked as Non-con for one instance of non-consensual kissing. The actual sex scene depicted within is between completely consenting individuals.
> 
> Work marked as Graphic Depictions of Violence for instances of live-steel duels.

title: World Revolution War  
Written for Round Two of the X-Men Reverse Bang @ [](http://xmenreversebang.livejournal.com/profile)[**xmenreversebang**](http://xmenreversebang.livejournal.com/)  
author: [](http://ilovetakahana.livejournal.com/profile)[**ilovetakahana**](http://ilovetakahana.livejournal.com/) / [](http://ninemoons42.dreamwidth.org/profile)[**ninemoons42**](http://ninemoons42.dreamwidth.org/)  
artist: [](http://lady-date.livejournal.com/profile)[**lady-date**](http://lady-date.livejournal.com/) / Seitou | [Art Master Post Here](http://seitou.tumblr.com/post/60457371916/art-for-world-revolution-war-after-being)  
rating: R  
X-Men Verse: XMFC  
pairing: Charles Xavier/Erik Lehnsherr  
warnings: Canonical character deaths. Children with suicidal thoughts. Cross-dressing and implications of genderplay. Teenagers acting like teenagers and adults at the same time. Teenagers engaged in live-steel duels. Discussion of abusive relationships and bullying, plus one non-consensual kiss. Major age differences. Underage sex with a twist.  
betas: [](http://afrocurl.livejournal.com/profile)[**afrocurl**](http://afrocurl.livejournal.com/), [thoughtsnotunveiled](http://thoughtsnotunveiled.tumblr.com)  
notes: I wrote this story in a hurry because the story was more or less attempting to claw its way out of me. I'm in complete and total awe of my collaborator's determination to add so much to the beauty and the complexity of this work and the world that it inhabits. To Seitou: thank you for working with me, thank you for creating this world, and thank you for letting me jump headfirst into it.

WORLD REVOLUTION WAR  
written by ninemoons42 for art by lady date/seitou  
a Shoujo Kakumei Utena / X-Men: First Class fusion

**one: the orphaned prince**

_“Once upon a time there was a little boy who was so greatly loved by his mother and father that he learned to love all the world. He was so happy that he dreamed of becoming a prince, so that he could make the whole world happy, too._

_“But one day, his heart was plunged into sadness and despair when death took his mother and father from him. And when he lost them, he lost the world._

_“So the boy who had wanted to become a prince forgot what it was like to be happy, and forgot what it was like to love and be loved.”_

Erik remembers fire, and rain, and screaming.

He remembers his mother’s arms, warm around him and wet, streaked with red as they held him, so tightly.

He remembers his father’s voice, rough and broken and still trying to reassure him, even as the words were whipped away.

The wind that lashes at Erik now, that cuts through all his layers of shirt and suit and jacket, is just like the wind that had been so cold and so unforgiving on the day he lost the two of them. 

Rain falls, and he doesn’t pay attention to how his hair is getting soaked, to how wet his feet are inside the heavy new shoes. 

The earth beneath his feet is loose and slippery and he lurches forward as he pulls himself free from the people holding him back. The marble slab lying next to the open grave is cold to his nearly-numb fingertips. Plain and smooth stone, except where there are letters carved deeply, letters that Erik reaches out to touch.

There is a brief sharp flare of pain in his left hand.

He’s too burdened by his grief to notice.

Someone makes a distressed noise and calls out his name, but he doesn’t hear, and he doesn’t respond.

He leaves a red stain on the marble, just for a moment. The rain washes that away, too - as it washes away his tears, as it piles grief upon the grief that already pulls him down to the earth.

“Erik,” someone says, and there are hands wrapped around his, careful, gentle. These aren’t his mother’s hands. He will never feel her hands again. Now other people must bandage his wounds and wipe away his tears and lead him away. Now other people must guide him to turn his back on the grave marker on which his parents’ names are inscribed.

Erik cries, and cries, until he has no more tears to shed - until he has no more voice to whisper - until there is little left of him but his grief.

*

Not long after his parents are buried he wanders away from everything and everyone that he thought he knew. He passes over a bridge and doesn’t hear the water as it roars past. He stands at a street corner and sees neither the people nor the cars flashing by. He walks beneath a tree and never hears the wind whistling through its boughs full of leaves and fruit - nor does he see the roses twined around the trunk, supporting it, lending their sweet and spicy fragrance to the scene.

He walks, and he can hear his footsteps dragging, and when he looks up he knows he’s been heading here all along. He thinks that he might be heading this way for the rest of his life. That sooner or later he will be found here, in this garden of stones and of statues and of lonely trees: a permanent resident, whether above the ground or beneath it.

The grave marker is a plain, solemn guardian over his parents, scarcely weathered, even though it has been in place for more than a month.

Erik looks around, through his tears, and nearby there is something that wasn’t there before.

An empty coffin - one sized for a child.

Erik is not abnormally large or small for his age. He is nine years old, and maybe he will have broader shoulders like his father’s, and shapely hands like his mother’s. 

Right now he is only himself, hunched in on the tears. 

His parents had been cremated and their ashes mingled into a single box-shaped urn, and the urn had been buried beneath the grave marker.

He brushes his fingers across the letters that spell out _Lehnsherr_ \- and he turns away and swipes angrily, fruitlessly, at the tears streaming down his face. He stumbles over the uneven ground.

The empty coffin is partly open. Plain wood, aromatic, dark-grained. A thin lining of white silk. The seams are smooth beneath his fingers.

Erik climbs into the coffin.

Here it’s silent and dry. Here he’s within an arm’s-length of his parents.

He closes his eyes, and before he knows it he’s gone to sleep, naturally and easily, without needing to cry himself breathless first.

*

The woman who is looking after him only looks sad when he’s brought home to her, and there is a pained sort of understanding in her eyes. Her name is Miriam, and all Erik knows about her is that she was his mother’s childhood friend.

“Will it help,” she asks, a few weeks after the incident with the coffin, “if I gave you that which was left to you?”

Erik shakes his head. “I didn’t know that anything was left. I was there when they read the will. It didn’t say anything about things that were to be passed to me.”

“Some of their things were sent to friends, Erik. I am one of those friends who received something - however, unlike them, I was given instructions, too. I’m to do something with the item that I received.” Miriam pauses, looks away, and takes a deep breath that breaks somewhere in the middle, around a sob that she cannot suppress. “I was instructed to see that you lived long enough to know what to do with it.”

“What is it?”

She says, “Give me your hands.”

Erik does.

She places something small and round in his cupped palms.

Erik holds it up to eye level. Curiosity is a new sensation after being wrapped in such deep and choking grief. The ring is smooth and carved from something like black stone, so it’s actually heavier than something that small should be. The inner and outer surfaces have both been worn down some, as if from heavy use. 

When he turns it over to look at the bezel, the colors suddenly jump out at him, all the brighter for the unexpected setting: white lines on vivid scarlet.

“What is it?” Erik asks, finally.

“That rose is the crest of the Academy for Higher Learning,” Miriam murmurs. “Your mother and I went there. The experience changed her life, and that change had a lot to do with that ring, but she never told me anything about it.”

“So that means I don’t know anything about it,” Erik says.

“I think that, as she did, you will have to find out for yourself. And that means you have to live, Erik.”

“Why? Can’t I go now?” He is not interested. He is asking only because he has to know.

“You have to be at least fifteen to be admitted, and of course you have to pass a series of required examinations. They seem to screen their students very carefully.”

“You passed. The two of you.”

“We did, and we got in,” Miriam says. “If you want to know why your mother left you that ring, then you will have to go to the Academy, as well.”

Erik turns the ring around in his hands, over and over again. 

The light in the room shatters on the rose and throws red flashes into his eyes.

After a moment, he asks, “My mother wore this ring when she was at that school?”

“Yes, she did,” Miriam says. “There was never a day that went by that she wasn’t wearing it.”

“Then I’ll wear it for her,” Erik says. 

The ring is a little too large for the fourth finger of his left hand, but it’s not so loose that it falls off when he makes a fist and then unclenches it.

That night, as he goes to sleep in the bed that Miriam has prepared for him, body curled unconsciously around the ring - his mother’s ring, the only memento he has of her - Erik thinks he hears a voice whispering to him of _World Revolution_.

**two: out into the world**

There is one more open suitcase on Erik’s bed. He’s already finished packing his clothes away; his school books are waiting for him at the Academy for Higher Learning.

What remains in this room are the fragments of the life he’s lived by himself, the life he’s lived within the limited circle of his studies and the woman he’s learned to call “Aunt”.

A handful of books: the spines cracked and worn from constant use. _The Once and Future King_ , two bulky editions of _Les Misérables_ \- one in French and one in English - a tattered copy of _A Journey to the Centre of the Earth_. His hands are shaking as he packs each one away. There are other books in this room, arranged on his dresser in neat piles. These are the ones he’s chosen to take away with him. His companions.

He’s been spending the past few weeks thinking more frequently of his parents, and now the simple act of placing books in a suitcase almost makes him want to dash the tears away. He remembers the many-times-mended pocket of his mother’s coat, where she’d always carried a book with her; he remembers the small but handsome collection of beautiful books bound in scarlet leather on the desk where his father wrote his letters.

“Would you consider adding one more title to your little collection?”

Erik looks up, and musters up a watery smile, no more than a turning up of the corners of his mouth.

Aunt Miriam gives the smile back - the same trembling smile - and enters the room. The volume she offers him is covered in dark burgundy leather, something that seems out of place in a house of plain wooden floors and walls covered in flat pastel paint - but the title is immediately recognizable, and he traces the silver-foil letters with a shaking hand. “ _The Little Prince_ ,” he says. “You bought a new copy?”

“Open it,” she says.

Erik does, and is confronted with dog-eared pages, familiar and yellowed by age. A distinctive scent of wood, faintly sweet and faintly dusty, soon wraps itself around his hands.

“That was the copy that I grew up with; I had it rebound,” Miriam says after a moment, after Erik looks back at her, mute with surprise. “It’s yours, now.”

“I couldn’t possibly - ”

“You will take it with you when you go, Erik. I want you to have it,” she says as she sits down on the foot of his bed. 

The years have been kind to her, and there is only a little silver winding artfully into her still-lustrous dark hair. Lines in her face for the emotions of the past seven years, emotions she’s shared with him for the most part: they are most pronounced around her eyes and around her mouth, where she’s wept and laughed and talked about all of the memories that had been left to her, where Erik has learned to exist again beneath the crushing weight of what had been taken away from him, what he should have had still.

“That was the first thing you ever became interested in after - after Jakob and Edie,” Miriam says, a little wistful around the edges. “It was something that called you back to life. You should take it with you now. In the morning your new journey will begin. You’ll want something familiar when you start moving in places that you know nothing about, places that will be new to you.”

“And yet you’ve told me so much about the Academy, I feel like I’ve already become familiar with it,” Erik says, when he sits down next to her, and leans lightly on her shoulder.

She almost laughs in response, and her hand, already freckled with age, comes up to cover her mouth. “I can assure you that it will be a new place, full of new faces, new experiences. I took a certain path when I was there. You will take another, because - ” And she reaches over and touches his ring.

Erik is still wearing his mother’s rose signet on the fourth finger of his left hand. He’s grown into it; it fits him perfectly, now.

“That will mean something for you, as it once did for her,” Miriam says. “So you must still expect new things. All I can give you is a map, and a warning. And all _she_ can give you is a ring that is now a key. Were she here, I know what she would have said to you: The life you live at the Academy will be yours alone.”

Erik nods. “Thank you for keeping the ring for me. Thank you for giving it to me.” He takes a deep breath. “Thank you for taking care of me.”

He reaches out, then, and puts his arms around her shoulders.

“Oh, Erik,” Miriam murmurs as she returns his embrace, as she holds on. “I - I really wish that this hadn’t been me. You should be saying goodbye to your parents at the train station. You should be watching them hold back their tears as they saw you off to your new life.”

“If it hadn’t been for you,” Erik whispers, fighting off his own emotions, “I wouldn’t be alive at all to do something like this. You’ve done so much for me. I’ll always be grateful that you persisted in convincing me that I was still alive. I’ll always remember everything you’ve taught me.”

“Then I’ll be happy,” she says. “I’ll wish you luck. And I will counsel you to see with your eyes and with your heart.”

“I will,” Erik says. “I’ll try.”

*

Erik watches as the lights go out all over the Academy for Higher Learning: windows going dark and vanishing into the crisp chill of the autumn night.

His own room has been dark for at least an hour now. He should be sleeping, he knows that, because the schedule he’s already posted next to his bed says that he has an algebra class first thing in the morning.

He’s tired - he’s spent the day at welcome assemblies and a long walking tour of the grounds. He could never have guessed that the Academy sprawls out as much as it does; all he can do is hope that he won’t get lost when he has to move from classroom to library to laboratory to the gymnasium complex for his classes.

Somewhere in the distance, the bells toll the hour, ten solemn notes and then a silence that seems to hold the world in cupped hands.

He’s been assigned a single room at the far end of a third-floor corridor. The walls are painted a pale green to match the bedding. The desk is small and tucked away into a corner, but there is more than enough shelving next to it to accommodate an entire raft of books, so Erik doesn’t mind very much.

There’s a key on his desk. It’s the key to his room. The very idea of it is a weight on his heart. He’s never had to lock his door before; he’d been happier leaving the door ajar, so that Aunt Miriam could come to him and wake him from his nightmares, or so that he could go to the study and attempt to read himself into oblivion on the nights when sleep eluded him.

He knows no one in this place. Perhaps that’s the reason for the idea of security: he can lock his door and make sure that no one can come in to steal his things. Not that he has anything of any real value with him, save perhaps for his rose signet ring. 

Still, it would be terribly upsetting if someone came in and thoughtlessly went through his books, so he gets up and makes sure that the door is locked, then drops the key into a pocket of his bag before climbing into bed.

He thinks about Aunt Miriam and her promise to send him a box of chocolates every two weeks, and he misses the scents of home. Woodsmoke and violets, the pots of lavender and rosemary that grew outside the kitchen window, sugar and rainwater and well-worn cotton.

*

The room for the first period algebra class seats about forty students, and Erik has chosen to sit near the back, the better to be able to see both the lecturer and the chalkboard.

It also allows him to see the backs of his classmates’ heads. The morning sunlight pours in through a row of small windows near the ceiling. Red hair and blonde and brown and all shades in between. There seems to be no rule against dyeing hair, if the girl with the twin streaks of fluorescent blue hair is any indication. Colors above a sea of black uniforms. His jacket is warm, and it has a high collar, and the heavy plainness of it is broken only by the dull silvery sheen of his buttons: a single row down the front, and two more on each turned-back cuff. It makes him think of a soldier’s formal uniform, and all he needs is some kind of cap - except that hats seem to be forbidden at the Academy.

The lecturer strides into the classroom at eight on the dot, and the chalkboard is quickly covered with equations, and Erik squints at his own chickenscratch handwriting and hopes that he’ll be able to decipher himself when it’s time to do his homework.

The bell rings at nine-thirty to signal the next class, and Erik blinks and wonders where the time has gone. He has to scramble to pick up his things, and he’s the last one out of the classroom and into the corridor.

There are people huddled up and down in groups, animated voices talking to each other and talking over each other, and Erik puts his free hand in his pocket and watches the conversations pass him by.

*

By the end of the first week, Erik has gotten quite used to looking up from the end of a table to find everyone talking to everyone else - everyone else, that is, except for him. 

Many of the conversations around him are conducted at almost full volume, so he finds that he knows about people getting lost as they try to find a particular reading room. He hears about the second-year boy who was chased out of a first-years’ dance class and about the fourth-year boy who scrawled a love letter in chalk on the sidewalk outside his best friend’s dorm. 

He can pick out the faces of the people who live on his floor when he enters one of the communal spaces that seem scattered all over the school grounds: libraries and cafeterias and gardens, where some of the introductory classes are being taught to take advantage of the brilliant weather. 

He’s sitting by himself beneath a tree when he thinks about writing a letter to his aunt, and he looks up at the brilliant blue sky and takes in the laughter and the voices crashing around him before he opens one of his notebooks and reaches for the pen that he carries in his pocket.

*

The wind blows a steady cold down Erik’s collar as he stops on the path and looks around at the buildings surrounding him, and not for the first time he wonders just how many libraries this place must have, because the location for a book that he needs for one of his science classes is entirely unknown to him.

He looks over his shoulder; the nearest crowd of students he can spot is congregating in one of the gardens, and he’s just about made up his mind to go and ask for actual directions when there’s a tap on his shoulder. 

He doesn’t jump in surprise, because no one talks to him here, but he only just manages to avoid it.

“Cold day out, isn’t it?” someone asks behind him.

The first impression Erik gets when he turns around, warily, is of bright blonde hair flying like flags in the relentless breeze. Next is the unusual uniform. Almost every other girl that Erik has seen wears a military-style jacket, styled much like his, over an ivory shirt and a short black skirt; this girl’s skirt is noticeably longer, stopping a few inches below her knees. Her freckles are spackled across skin gone rosy and chapped from the cold. She is wearing a little eyeliner, dark blue in the inner corners of her brown eyes. “Hello,” she says. “I’m Raven.”

“Hello,” Erik says, somewhere between disinterested and distracted. He really does need that textbook. He glances back at the note that one of the librarians had given him, and then at his surroundings, and he sets off again, hoping he’s reading the directions correctly.

“You’re not going to tell me your name?” the girl says as she walks with him.

“Why should I?” 

Her face contorts into a complicated expression, one that could be part amusement and part irritation - and also part mischief. 

Erik is wary of that last bit.

“Oh, so we’re going to be friends by playing games,” Raven says with a laugh. “That’s okay!”

“I didn’t say anything about friends,” Erik says.

“‘I didn’t say anything about friends,’” Raven parrots, all the way down to his accent. “You’re getting one anyway. I’m persistent. You look like someone who likes to be alone, and you shouldn’t be, when you’re at a new school and you’re far away from everyone and everything you’ve ever known. I’ve been watching you for the past day or so - you’re in one of my math classes - and you know what’s strange about you?” 

Erik keeps walking, and she keeps up, step for step, past a building with glass windows for walls. “What?”

“No one ever talks to you,” she says. “You walk around so much and there’s never anyone with you. You make me feel a little bit sad, watching you have tea all by yourself.”

Because that makes Erik think about pulling out Aunt Miriam’s chair for her at the table, because that makes him remember waiting for her to pour the coffee, he says nothing.

Raven seems to take his silence as assent. “Of course I can’t actually visit you at your dorm, I think that would be improper, but you’ll tell me where you like to spend your free periods, so I can come and join you.”

“Is it also improper,” he says as dryly as he can, “for me to tell you to shut up and leave me alone?”

“Yes it is,” she sing-songs at him. “You can’t do that. We’re going to be friends. Okay?”

Erik sighs, and knows defeat when he sees it - and some small part of it seems to welcome that defeat.

*

They’re almost a month into the term when Erik leaves his last class for the day and walks toward the spot on the history library steps that Raven has proclaimed to be “theirs”; he nibbles on half a peanut butter and grape jam sandwich as he tries to puzzle out the last item on today’s trigonometry problem set.

“Erik, look,” is the only indication he has of Raven’s arrival - that and she’s tugging at his sleeve.

He looks.

The library overlooks a small quad that is almost always full of students standing around in groups and chattering away, every voice louder than the last - but as he watches, silence falls and everyone moves out of the way, staring at the two people pacing across the grass.

The first girl is taller than Raven, and wears her silvery-blonde hair in a single, long, severe braid; the hairstyle and her uniform trousers seem to match the military-like decorations on her jacket. Color bars on the left, an aiguillette on the right, and yellow epaulettes to match the trim on her cuffs. Her smile seems frozen in place, calculated, even as she waves to those who must be her admirers.

The second girl seems to be the object of the whispers rising slowly but inexorably in the quad. Dark brown hair cut short, falling loose and almost into her striking dark blue eyes - the sky above seems dimmer and washed out in comparison, as there is such sparking interest in those depths, which Erik can see even with her eyeglasses in the way. A sleeveless dress in white, with blue petticoats peeking out from her billowing skirts. Her bodice is an almost exact copy of the blonde girl’s military jacket, except for the colors of her decorations. She is wearing a golden collar of some kind. 

The crowd stays looking in their direction long after they’ve swept up the steps of another set of dormitories.

“Aren’t they just wonderful?” Raven asks, eventually, when she steals the last bite of sandwich.

“I don’t even know who they are,” Erik mutters, dusting crumbs from the pages of his textbook.

There’s a quiet sound of disbelief very nearby, and then Raven tugs on his cuff again. “Why am I not surprised,” she says, in a long-suffering tone that Erik thinks might bode ill for his fortunes in the next half-hour or so, “that you weren’t even paying attention during the first week of classes?”

“I listened,” Erik protests, but only half-heartedly. “I haven’t ever gotten lost on this campus; they’re still rescuing people from distant gardens and the third swimming pool as of yesterday.”

“What you’ve missed is just as important,” Raven says. “The girl in the amazing black jacket is on the Student Council. Emma Frost.”

“I see,” Erik says, nonplussed. 

“And that girl with her, wow, I’m not sure I’ve managed to find out who that was yet, but the dress should be a help - it’s really not at all like _my_ uniform.”

“It’s a big campus,” Erik says.

Raven winks at him. “Where the gossip mill is really, really, _really_ small.”

*

“I really wish,” Erik says, two weeks later, “that you hadn’t made that joke about the gossip mill.”

“And I really wish,” Raven sniffles, “that you would stop with the I-told-you-so.”

They’re in his room, and the door is hanging ajar, but no one dares come in to shoo Raven out because this isn’t her dorm. 

This is partly because Erik glares at everyone who passes by; but mostly it’s because Raven is still crying, and the sounds of her sobbing are soft and clear and startling.

“Okay, I’ll stop,” Erik says, and he pats her back, a little less awkwardly than the first or second time he’d tried it. “Do you want me to get you anything?”

“Do you still have any chocolate?”

“Yes,” and he nudges the box in her direction. “I just got this one at the beginning of the week. You should have all of it.”

“No, no, I don’t need that much - I just want one piece,” Raven says, hiccuping around the words.

When she looks back up she’s still wrecked, she’s still awash in her tears, but she’s no longer actively crying. “I’m sorry,” she says after eating the bonbon that Erik offers her.

“You don’t have to apologize to me,” Erik says. “But I’ll make whoever did that to you sorry.”

“Don’t do that. I - don’t think it’s a good idea for you to antagonize that guy.”

“Even if it was the headmaster I’d make him feel bad. No one is allowed to make you cry.”

He gets a small smile for that, but the effect is spoiled when Raven almost immediately has to blow her nose again. “Thank you for saying that,” she mutters. “It’s good to know I’ve got a friend.”

Erik stops, and thinks, and nods. “I’m your friend.”

“I know. So please promise me you won’t do anything stupid, like yell at Azazel.”

Erik narrows his eyes. “You don’t think he deserves to be punished for what he did?”

“He’s not worth it,” Raven says, as firmly as she can. “I mean it, Erik. Don’t. _Please._ ”

He passes her another piece of chocolate in its little paper cup, and he thinks he hears her sigh.

*

It only takes Erik two days to find Student Council Vice President Azazel Wagner - and by the time he rounds the bend in the path, by the time he steps up to the older boy in the decorated jacket, his fury on Raven’s behalf has cooled to a perfectly icy resolve.

“You’re one of the new students,” Azazel says. “What do you want?”

“I don’t want anything for myself,” Erik says. “You should ask me what Raven wants.”

“Raven?” Azazel raises an eyebrow. “Who is that?”

“You don’t even remember,” Erik breathes, after a very long pause, full of disbelief. 

The next thing he knows, he’s winding up and getting ready to throw a punch.

And he _lands_ the punch - but Azazel doesn’t seem surprised by that. While he is looking at Erik’s hand, his attention is on something else entirely. He says, “You’re wearing a rose signet.”

Erik growls, “Yes, and?” 

“Then you’re one of us,” Azazel says. He holds up his own left hand.

On his little finger is a ring that is exactly identical to that of Erik’s.

“I don’t understand what that has to do with what you did to Raven - ”

“If you truly want to settle this matter, then I will grant you the loser’s way out,” Azazel says, springing to his feet. His entire manner has changed: he’s smirking, now, and there is a weight that gathers around him, that feels to Erik like some strange unexplainable _power_. “I challenge you to a duel. You will meet me in one hour at the circle near the duck pond. You may bring Raven if you wish, but be warned that all she might see is you ground into the dust.

“Bring a sword,” Azazel adds, when he walks away.

“What the hell?” Erik asks out loud, long after his opponent has gone. “What do you mean, _bring a sword_?”

*

Erik spots the dueling circle as soon as he passes the duck pond behind his dormitory, and he also sees the strange cylindrical greenhouse placed directly opposite it. There is a shadow moving in the clouded interior of the space, but he gives it only a cursory glance. He’s too preoccupied by the fight at hand. His heart pounds as he takes the steps to the circle, two and three at a stride. 

“I thought I told you to bring a sword?” Azazel sneers from the other side of the platform. “Are you even aware that there are _rules_ to be followed here, or are you just an idiot?”

Erik casts about for something, anything, that he could use, because Azazel _is_ carrying a sword, and what’s more, it looks like the real thing: a wicked curve of a broad blade. The sunlight shatters on its single cutting edge. 

Finally he spots two branches lying crossed on the platform, and he picks them both up. One is short and thick and he holds it braced against his left forearm, for protection; the other is long and slender. The very tip of it cracks softly through the air when he whips it up to what he thinks is an en garde position. 

Adrenaline pounds through him, electrifying his nerves, a live wire through each of his senses. If Azazel is carrying a real blade, there’s no chance he’s getting away from this one without being hurt. He doesn’t know the first thing about fighting; all he’s doing right now is moving on pure instinct. 

Still Erik grits his teeth. Still he sets his feet. “I’ll fight you,” he growls. “Because you’ve hurt Raven, and because you’ve pissed me off.”

“Strong words.” Azazel shrugs. “Well, if you insist. Charles. Attend us.”

“Your will, Vice President,” is the response.

There’s a footstep, loud in the sudden hush, and Erik tenses, every impulse screaming fight-or-flight. 

Another boy steps onto the platform, dressed in a blue version of Azazel’s uniform, but without the sleeves; instead, the boy has detached cuffs, elaborate and stiffly starched, encircling his wrists. He is wearing golden jewelry: a collar around his neck, a small hoop in his left earlobe. 

Erik blinks. He’s seen the decorations on the jacket before, the steel-framed eyeglasses, the shock of brown hair. Something about the boy is familiar, just tantalizingly out of reach.

“Rose Groom,” Azazel says, and he’s drawling the words out for some reason. “You will do your duty.”

Then he reaches out for Charles’s shoulder and roughly reels him in for a kiss.

Even from where he’s standing on the other side of the platform, Erik finds himself suddenly bristling, because it’s not so much a kiss as it is a casual gesture of possession - there’s no emotion in it at all.

More importantly, Charles isn’t leaning into the kiss.

Erik watches, quietly furious, as Charles very calmly wipes the back of his hand across his kiss-swollen mouth - and then somehow he produces two roses from empty air.

The rose Charles places in Azazel’s jacket is an unnatural and too-vivid green.

Erik has to fight the impulse to step back when Charles approaches him with the other rose, pure blinding white. 

“You don’t understand what’s going on,” are the first words that come out of Charles’s mouth.

Erik still thinks he looks familiar, and now he _sounds_ familiar, too.

“I’m sorry,” Charles continues, kindly, as he fastens the white rose into the buttonhole placed over Erik’s heart. “You don’t look like you’ve been in a duel before. I will hope that this will be quick, then, and therefore merciful.” He looks over his shoulder, at Azazel whose arms are crossed over his chest. “It would have been nicer if you knew something.”

“I don’t know anything,” Erik says and doesn’t know why he’s saying the words, “but I’ll still fight. For my friend. For myself. For _you_.”

Charles answers with another tight-lipped smile, and steps aside.

Azazel just charges, then, without any warning - he sweeps his sword forward in great scything strokes, forcing Erik to leap backwards for his own safety.

Immediately he knows that his makeshift shield will be useless in this encounter - but he can still use it. 

Azazel advances on him, merciless, and Erik trusts to his own natural reflexes to keep him out of harm’s way.

His mind, on the other hand, is churning through opportunities, possibilities.

Patience is not one of his strong suits. He claws for it, because the alternative is being gutted, and bleeding painfully to death.

There is a part of him that recoils at the thought of dying where Charles’s depthless blue eyes can see him in his final throes.

Finally, unlooked-for, Azazel overextends himself, too confident or too cocky or both, and Erik doesn’t think - he just drives his left forearm, the forearm reinforced by the branch, toward his opponent’s face.

There’s a sickening _crack_ of impact as Azazel runs nose-first into the fast-moving wood.

With the other branch Erik slashes the green rose from the black jacket.

Petals falling at Erik’s feet.

To his credit, Azazel only growls at Erik, an inarticulate sound of pure anger, before turning on his heel and walking off the platform.

Erik looks past him, shaking as he comes down from his high. He’d been expecting revenge, maybe, or a retaliatory punch to the mouth.

Instead he’s here, looking at the enigmatic and oddly triumphant smile that lights up Charles’s face.

“Welcome,” Charles says as he takes Erik’s makeshift weapons from his hands, “to the struggle for World Revolution. I am the Rose Groom. My name is Charles Xavier. And for now, Erik Lehnsherr, I am yours, until you should be defeated in a duel, or until you should claim the power that each duelist seeks.”

“World Revolution,” Erik says, slowly, caught up in looking at Charles he looks steadily back. “I’ve heard that phrase before.”

“And you will again,” Charles says. “I give you my word on that.”

**three: a birdcage for roses**

Erik wakes up in a bed that isn’t his. Twice the size of the cot in his original quarters, it’s much more comfortable, too: the sheets smell like seawater and freshly cut grass, and there are pillows everywhere, firm and soft at the same time.

He rolls over, into a spot that’s much warmer than the rest of the bed, and cracks one eye open.

Murmur of running water somewhere very close by, and Erik reluctantly, slowly, forces himself to wake up all the way. He has to remember what has happened to him. Chocolate, and Raven wiping her tears away as she curled into herself at the foot of his bed. She’d tried to ask Azazel Wagner to a dance. Instead of turning her down gently, he’d insulted her in front of more or less the entire school, had turned her into a laughingstock and tried to spread a vicious rumor about her besides, something that had to do with the family that she refuses to talk about.

Erik remembers punching Azazel in the face - and then he remembers the challenge, the duel, and meeting - 

Clouds of steam pour into the room from the attached bathroom. Charles steps up to the foot of the bed, smelling of wildflowers and cherry blossoms. He seems blissfully unconcerned by the fact that his bathrobe is slipping partway off his right shoulder. “Good morning, Erik,” he says with a bright smile. “Did you sleep well?”

Erik looks around. There is still only one bed here, and from the way that Charles is picking his way towards the dresser next to one of the windows, he knows this room inside and out. Which means - “We slept next to each other?” Erik asks, at sea.

“Yes,” Charles says as he pushes his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “You throw off a lot of warmth, do you know that? It was like sleeping next to a fireplace. Thank you. I like being warm.”

“You’re welcome?” Erik offers. 

He watches as Charles raises an eyebrow at him, and he decides that Charles must be laughing at him, and when he thinks back over the past few minutes he thinks he might know why. “I’m sorry,” Erik says next. “I’m not exactly a morning person. By which I meant to say, hello. Good morning. I slept well, and I’m glad you slept well too.”

Charles’s answering chuckle is low and rich and warm. Erik watches him sit down at the dresser to start toweling his hair dry. There are dark strands curling at his temples. “There’s lots of hot water,” he offers.

“I - thank you,” Erik says. He has to get out of bed and he has to take a towel from the stack in a wicker basket next to Charles’s feet, which means he has to come close, and when his mind catches up with him for the second time in ten minutes he’s looking aghast at Charles’s reflection in the mirror. “Why didn’t I see those bruises yesterday? Who hurt you?”

Finger-shaped marks around Charles’s throat, around Charles’s wrists. Red and purple shading into mottled yellow and green, stark against pale skin and deep freckles. Layers upon layers of bruising, as if the older sets had not even been able to heal before they’d been covered afresh.

“These?” Charles says, and he looks a little strained around the edges. “I - I covered them up. i normally do, or no one notices - ”

“Who hurt you?” Erik hopes he only sounds confused, because if he sounds suspicious - or worse, angry - Charles might not tell him the truth.

Charles looks away first. He folds his hands in his lap. “It was Azazel,” he says, at last. 

Erik thinks that over for a moment. “You know,” he says, carefully, still looking at Charles, “I don’t think I hit him hard enough yesterday. Next time, if there should be a next time, will you let me break his jaw?”

Charles blinks. “...Pardon, are you asking for permission, or is it a suggestion, or - ?”

“I think I broke Azazel’s nose yesterday,” Erik explains as he takes one of the fluffy, oversized towels. “I’ll break more than that next time, if you’ll allow it. I’ll break half the bones in his body, and you can break the rest.”

He can feel Charles’s eyes on him all the way into the bathroom, even after he closes the door behind him.

There’s a fresh set of clothes laid out on the made bed when he’s done, and he gets dressed in a hurry, follows the quiet singing into the next room - only to come to a halt so he can take it all in.

High ceilings and long tall windows, so the space is flooded with sunlight. Tucked into one of the corners is a couch and a set of armchairs and a few low tables, and next to that is a series of bookshelves, filled to bursting. The opposite corner is occupied by a grand piano, partly draped in pale green silk.

Charles is standing in the center of the room next to a table set for two, and he is wearing a blue uniform jacket - the sleeves cover his arms, but they end in the same set of exaggerated cuffs that he’d worn to the duel - over black trousers. His collar and his earring gleam in the sunlight. Steam rises from the dishes covered in cloth. There is a tea service in polished silver. 

Erik’s eyes keep going back to Charles, even when he knows he’s supposed to be looking around and asking questions. Is this Charles’s dormitory? Where do the other doors in this sunlit room lead? 

Why does he feel like he’s standing in a place he could call home?

“Coffee?” Charles asks, seemingly taking Erik’s staring in stride. He lifts one of the pots with graceful, spare movements. 

“Yes,” Erik says at last, and he pulls out Charles’s chair for him before sitting down himself. He lifts the covers from the dishes, one after the other. Hot, fresh bread. Cool, pale butter. Cherry preserves and lemon curd. Scrambled eggs and sausages fried to a deep golden brown. A bowl of deep red apples. He puts a little of everything on his plate, except for the apples, and accepts a cup of fragrant coffee from Charles - but before he eats, he reaches for what he thinks is the actual teapot. “Give me your cup, please,” he says.

Charles looks shyly surprised by the gesture - and afterwards he laughs, soft disbelief in the corners of his eyes, at Erik’s eyes intently watching him pour milk into his tea.

“So I can do that for you next time,” Erik explains as he picks up his fork.

“Really, thank you, but - ” Charles begins.

“You’re going to look after me, you said. All right. But that means I will try to look after you, too. I promise I will, even though I might not be very good at it.”

“All right,” Charles says, very gently.

*

“It’s going to be a very nice Saturday, I think. Did you have any plans?” Charles asks over the remains of their breakfast.

“Homework?” is Erik’s first reply. “And - I had a lot of questions to ask you, if that’s allowed.”

“Of course it is,” Charles says, and puts his tea aside. “If you’d like to have a quiet conversation, I know just the place.”

It takes Erik a moment to recognize his surroundings when they’re out on the path; a short distance away is his dormitory, and he takes pains to point his own window out to an amused Charles. The duck pond is directly outside, though Charles’s rooms are screened from the path by a low trellis for ivy. Many of the leaves are larger than Erik’s hand, lustrous and healthy and deep green in the sunlight.

From the duck pond Charles leads Erik toward the odd greenhouse that sits opposite the dueling platform; he produces a key from his pocket and unlocks the door.

Immediately Erik is hit by the rich sweet scent that swells like thick clouds above the carefully trimmed and trained rose bushes. Pale pink blooms everywhere, startling contrast against dark leaf and darker stem.

They enter, side by side. 

As Erik looks around, taking it all in, Charles picks up a watering can and hums to himself while filling it. The sunlight that pours in through the translucent glass walls shatters colorfully onto the streams of water.

In the center of the greenhouse is a large circular table surrounded by six chairs. 

“You have questions,” Charles murmurs, once his circuit of the roses takes him past Erik and the books he’s piled onto the table. “And I may have answers. Please, ask away.”

“I have no idea where to begin, except - ” Erik glances at his left hand. “Azazel challenged me to that duel the moment he saw my ring. He said that meant I was one of them - I assume that by that he means the group of people in these fights.”

Charles makes an encouraging sound, low in his throat. “Yes. The rose signet is the badge of a duelist. How did you come by yours?”

“It had been my mother’s,” Erik says. “I don’t know where she got it from. All I know is that she wore it when she was here. Edie Lehnsherr, formerly Edie Hauptman.”

“I think I remember hearing about her.”

“Was she a duelist?”

“Yes, she was, and I believe she was a very good one. But I also heard,” Charles murmurs thoughtfully, “that she had been part of a truly exceptional group of blade-masters.”

Erik smiles, a little, and thinks of his mother with a sword. It doesn’t hurt to think about what she had done, about what she had known.

When Charles drifts back to the table and takes the chair next to Erik’s, he says, “Do you want to know what they were fighting for?”

“World Revolution,” Erik says, thinking about the voice that had spoken to him the first time he’d worn the ring. “Which is - what? It’s valuable? It’s rare? The duels help to determine the best or the fittest or the most worthy of it?”

“That is scratching the surface of it, yes,” Charles says with a small chuckle.

Erik raises an eyebrow at him.

“Every generation is born thinking about wanting to change the world. Sometimes for the better. Sometimes for the worse. This is a place where that wish can be made to come true. If you held World Revolution in your hands you would be holding a rare chance to accomplish something that would truly change everything that you had ever known. It is a very great power, and as such it is also a very grave responsibility.”

“Which means - what? No one has won it, in all the years of this Academy? In all the years of the duels?”

“I think that we would have heard something, if it had been,” Charles says. Though his voice is still the same, smooth and quiet, there is an undertone of weighty import in his words. “No one has been found worthy. But there is always hope. At least, that is what is said here.”

Erik blinks and looks down at his hands. He hasn’t known that he’s been playing with his ring, twisting it round and round on his finger. “And you’re the Rose Groom. What does that have to do with World Revolution?”

Charles gets to his feet, and adjusts his eyeglasses, and opens his mouth to speak -

Only to be interrupted by a knock on the door. 

“Hello,” a female voice calls, cool and imperious. “If you are here, Rose Groom, we would speak with you.”

“The door was open,” a boy’s voice adds. “But we - I thought that it would still be polite to knock.”

Erik gets up from the table as Charles hurries back, wondering at the smile that lights up those features; he follows, at a more sedate pace.

He’s seen the girl before: the braided hair and the cord fastened to her right epaulette. This time, for some reason, she is carrying a rapier on a sword belt. She smiles and steps in towards Charles, who kisses her on the mouth.

The other boy is tall, overtopping Erik himself by at least five inches, though he walks with stooped shoulders and his arms wrapped around himself, much to the detriment of his jacket - the same jacket as Azazel’s and the girl’s, with similar decorations. He, too, receives a kiss on the lips - Charles has to rise up on his toes to reach him - and he blushes, after; he laughs as if self-conscious and pleased all at once.

“Come, Erik, introductions are in order,” Charles says.

Erik blinks. 

Charles had initiated these kisses. A far cry from Azazel’s - attack. The Rose Groom seems genuinely happy to see these visitors of his, and they seem equally pleased to see him.

For a moment Erik wonders what it would be like to be on the receiving end of one of those kisses.

Then, roughly, he masters himself and strides up to the other two. “Hello,” he says, politely. He is aware of Charles’s eyes on him.

“Erik, these are Emma Frost and Henry McCoy of the Student Council,” Charles says. “They, too, are duelists for World Revolution. Emma, Henry, this is Erik Lehnsherr. Yesterday Azazel challenged him to a duel.”

“Please call me Hank,” the taller boy half-stammers, waving with the hand on which he wears his ring..

“And I am Emma,” the girl says. “So you are the one who has won Charles. With naught but branches for weapons, at that. We might already be outmatched, Hank.”

“If I dueled him, I’d lose,” Hank says, flatly. “Begging your pardon, of course, Erik.”

Before Erik can say anything, Charles murmurs, “Come and sit,” and he links arms with their visitors, and ushers them towards the table.

Something about the fall of Charles’s hair in that moment takes Erik back to the first time he’d seen Emma, back to the girl who’d been walking with her in much the same way that Charles is doing now - and then he remembers why. 

He now knows why Charles seems so familiar, and the full import of it makes him stop dead on the path. The laughter explodes from him, unstoppable, irrepressible. He has to clutch at his sides so the hilarity doesn’t shake him apart.

“Erik?” Charles asks, sounding solicitous as always. 

“Perhaps you’d consider sharing the joke,” Emma says.

“I’m an idiot,” Erik says. “The first time I saw you, Charles, you were wearing a dress. Something white and blue. And you were with Emma.”

Charles turns an interesting shade of pink. “I - ”

“Emma does that,” Hank says. “When she wins a duel.”

“Don’t give me all the credit,” Emma says, and then she flashes Erik a sly grin, briefly there and gone. “Since Charles doesn’t protest at all. In fact, he sometimes _asks_ for it. I, of course, merely oblige him.”

Charles laughs and covers his hand with his mouth. “Emma, please - ”

“Oh, I’m just getting started.” She smirks at Erik. “If you ever want to hear any stories about what Charles does in his spare time, do let me know. I’ll tell you everything I can.”

“Can I sit in on those storytelling sessions?” Hank wonders out loud.

“Can you not be talking about me like I’m not here?” Charles says, mock-exasperated, all but rolling his eyes.

Erik blinks, and hurries back to his side. “I’m sorry for laughing. It wasn’t at you, honest.”

“I know,” Charles says. “And it was very good to see you laugh. Please, don’t worry about it.”

When they all sit down Erik finds himself on Charles’s right, in just the place to see the expressions flashing across his face. “May I know what brings you here?” Charles asks the others.

Erik watches the other two duelists as they trade glances. 

It’s Hank who answers. “We came to meet you, Erik,” he says, eventually. He was quavering earlier; he seems more resolute now. “We wanted to find out who you were.”

“We heard about how you took out Azazel, even when you had no idea of what you were doing,” Emma says. The cool facade from earlier cracks, a little, and he can see the odd little worry lines furrowing between her eyebrows as she frowns. “So we wanted to know about you, and we - well. We want to help you, actually. You have a lot of things to learn, and Charles is aware of one part of the story, while we are aware of some of the others. What we know, Hank and I, we are willing to share.”

Erik blinks, and takes that in, and finds himself saying “Thank you.” And: “Maybe _you_ could answer the question that I asked just before you showed up.”

“Which is?”

He looks at Charles as he asks the question. “What is the purpose of the Rose Groom, in the context of the struggle for World Revolution?”

Charles smiles. A brief turning up of the corners of his mouth. He nods, once, and stays silent.

Hank clears his throat. “I’m not sure that there are very accurate words for what I’m about to explain, but I will try, at least. Um. By your leave, Emma.”

“Please, Hank, no need to ask for permission,” she says. “Your worst will still be far better than anything I can come up with. Philosophy is not my strong suit. I think in terms of the sword.” She motions to her hip. “Tactics and strategies.”

Hank blushes, and plunges into the answer. “Okay. Think of it like this. The simplest image: World Revolution lies behind a locked door. How do you get to it? You need to consider three things. You need to consider the door, you need to consider the key to that door, and you need to consider the opener of that door.”

“And you are - ?” Erik murmurs to Charles.

“I’m the key,” Charles says, and even though he’s speaking very quietly, his voice seems to carry clearly, into the very corners of the greenhouse. “So that is one element of the puzzle. If there should be a successful duelist, then that person and I will find the door, and behind that door will be the power of World Revolution.”

Erik thinks that over for a few moments. “I think I understand all of it, except - key? Are you holding an actual key, or is your presence the key, or - ”

Emma blinks. “Oh, right. You don’t know about that part yet. You and Azazel used your own weapons during your duel. Technically speaking, that’s not against the rules.”

“No, it isn’t. So you think a demonstration might be in order?” Charles asks quietly. 

Hank very nearly cringes. “For the record, I’m not in favor of this idea, but if you’re really going to, all I’m going to do is watch.” 

“You know the words, Emma,” Charles says.

Erik gets slowly to his feet. “I don’t know what’s going on - ”

Emma, too, rises, and steps away from the table - and then in one smooth motion she draws her rapier and points it at Erik. “Erik. I challenge you to a duel for the hand of the Rose Groom.”

“Here? Now?” 

“Come with me, Erik,” Charles says, and he takes Erik’s hand.

Charles’s hand is small and rough, and there are odd angles in the bones for some reason, but he doesn’t have time to examine Charles’s fingers because he’s being led out of the greenhouse, across the short distance to the dueling circle.

“Perhaps you’d feel better, Erik,” Emma says from the other side of the platform, “if you do not think of this as an actual match. There will be no roses to knock away. I do not want to take Charles from you. But you must find out for yourself what we already know. This way, at least, you know that your opponent is not actually working against you.”

Erik looks at Charles, who is standing at his side. “Is there anything I need to do?”

“Yes,” Charles says as he closes his eyes. The smile that he wears is small and shadowed and secretive. “Catch me.”

“What?”

“Catch me,” Charles says again - and then he clasps his hands together over his heart, as if to pray.

The wind whips up, a long low lonely cry - and Charles tips his head back, his shoulders and the arch of his back following - too far, he’s going to fall over, he’s going to hit the ground head first - 

Erik steps to his side and catches him, puts an arm beneath his shoulders to stop him falling further -

A pinpoint sharp light suddenly blossoms over Charles’s heart, springing forth from his joined hands. That spark grows brighter and brighter still, blinding, and yet Erik can see that there is _something_ in the heart of that light, something he can grasp - 

The hilt of a sword emerges from Charles’s body. The pommel is inset with a stone that blazes as red as flames, in a mounting that reminds Erik of a rose. A vine worked in gold spirals up the dark smooth hilt. There is a long green jewel in the guard.

Erik grips the sword - hesitates for only a moment - and draws the full length of it from Charles. Words fall from Erik’s lips, a ringing cry, a declaration, a promise: 

_“Grant me the power to bring World Revolution!”_

And what he has just done feels right. It feels like he has always been meant to draw a sword from the boy in his arms.

There is an instinct rising in him, propelling him forward, pushing him to fight Emma - but first he lowers Charles the rest of the way to the ground, as gently as he can. He catches Charles’s joined hands in a brief squeeze, then gets back to his feet and points the sword at Emma. “We’re not fighting, you said,” he says.

Emma smiles and whips her rapier up into a salute, the hilt level with her mouth. “We’re not. But you - I must say, I’m impressed. Your form is impeccable. Are you sure you don’t know anything about fighting with a sword?”

Erik closes his eyes, and sweeps his sword down and away, the point almost touching the platform. “I wish that I could have been trained by my mother. I’ve been told that she was a great duelist, and that she stood in this very circle, wanting to be the one to claim the power of World Revolution. But she died when I was a child.”

“Please accept my sympathies.”

“Thank you.” Erik turns away from her and from Hank’s myopic scrutiny, and drops to his heels beside Charles, carefully raises Charles’s body so he can lay that dark-haired head on his knees. “You said you were the key,” he murmurs. “I did not think you would mean it as literally as that. A key that is a sword, that you hold within you.” 

Sure enough, when he lays the sword on Charles’s chest it disappears into him, gone as suddenly as it had appeared.

Eyes still closed, Charles smiles, and takes Erik’s hand once again. “Now you know.”

**four: a prince’s heart**

Even after Erik recognizes that he is looking up at the shadowed ceiling of the room that he is currently sharing with Charles, he can still almost _see_ the image in his dreams.

A woman with her dark hair caught in a low bun, just at the nape of her neck; she turns her head to the side, and he can see the hairpin, bright scarlet and gold. Her jacket is white and her epaulettes are fringed with gold. In lieu of decorations she wears a necklace of heavy golden links from which is suspended a single jewel, roughly the size and shape of a pigeon’s egg, its blue depths ablaze with a strange, fractured light.

She is only a shadow in his mind, but he can see all of the details clearly, all the way down to the rose signet on her left hand: the same rose signet that he is wearing now.

“Erik,” says a soft voice next to him.

He turns his head. 

Charles is curled up on his side, facing him. Wide awake. The starlight that fills the room with faint brightness is caught and held fast in his eyes. 

Erik stares, and for a moment, he sees lines in Charles’s face, the ghosts of old and imagined sorrows, the smudges of bruises long since faded. Rags thrown around his shoulders instead of his perfectly ordinary blue-striped pajamas and the soft sheets.

He has to blink, hard, to dispel the strange image.

It helps when Charles asks, “Erik, are you all right?”

Erik blinks several times, and takes a deep breath, and looks back up at the ceiling. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to wake you up,” he says gruffly. He wishes that he did not sound like he’s been running. A thousand miles, uphill, against the wind and the weight of cars, the crackle of unexpected flames. “I was dreaming of my mother. You should go back to sleep.”

“If you say so,” Charles says - but he pushes himself up from the pillows and the sheets rustle as he moves.

Erik watches Charles rise from their bed and walk around the room. There is a lamp atop the dresser and when Charles lights it, it drives away the darkness of the night and replaces it with a soft golden glow. Charles draws the curtains closed with graceful, unhurried movements - the starlight fades away, and the bars on the windows are hidden.

When the bed dips and shifts once again under Charles’s weight Erik is expecting him to lie down again.

Instead, Charles sits down on his heels near the foot of the bed, and pats his knee invitingly. “Come here,” he murmurs.

Because he hasn’t bothered to pick his eyeglasses up from his nightstand, he’s squinting a little, and Erik has to quash the thought of the Rose Groom looking, of all things, _cute_.

Still, he comes as if compelled, and puts his head in Charles’s lap, as directed, the two of them positioned at right angles to each other on the sheets. He’s acutely aware of Charles’s warmth, his scent: skin and bone and muscle supporting him. 

The knowledge leaves him tingling all over, leaves him wanting to get closer, if only he could.

Erik breathes, and he closes his eyes, but not to fall asleep.

“Perhaps you’d like me to tell you a story,” Charles says. The fingers of one hand are hovering just in Erik’s hair, tracing out little patterns and circles. “To help you get back to sleep.”

“And how are _you_ going to get any rest, then?” Erik asks. “Your classes begin earlier than mine. You showed me your schedule. I remember.”

“I’ll manage.” 

He opens his eyes, and Charles’s smile is a little soft around the edges. 

The silence of the room is complete enough that Erik can hear his own heartbeat speeding up, though he’s not even moving. 

What he is, is caught and held and gently wrapped in Charles’s presence.

“Once upon a time,” Charles begins, after a few long moments of all-encompassing silence, “the world was small and cruel and strange, and all those who lived in it knew nothing but hard labor and the pain of chains and shackles. Men were heartless, and women were unkind, and children were born into pain, and so all of them knew only darkness.

“Then a woman was born who wanted to know something else. She dreamed, and her dreams led her to believe in something that no one in that world had ever known: freedom. 

“So she fought, and she shed her blood and her tears, and at last she broke her chains and shackles. But she was not content, because she wanted everyone to be free - every man and woman and child. So she began to wander. She began to look for a way to bring the message of freedom to the whole world.

“Finally, she found her answer, but it was an answer that made her weep: for the only way she could free everyone was to be imprisoned once again. And worse, for with the cage that was set about her came the jeering and the hatred and the thanklessness of all those that she had unbound.

“The lives of men and women and children went on, and still the wise woman could do nothing but suffer for their sake.”

“That’s a really sad story,” Erik murmurs. “Didn’t anyone think about helping that wise woman?”

Charles sighs. “And what do you think would happen to anyone who tried to help her, if the world itself wanted to keep her imprisoned?”

“I don’t know,” Erik admits after a moment’s thought.

“I do, but that is a story for another day,” Charles whispers. Then, a little more brightly: “Can we go to sleep now?”

There is something about Charles’s answer, coming so easily, almost as if he knows something about the truth of the story, that makes Erik want to ask questions - but just then a clock somewhere tolls midnight, and the only thing he can say is: “Okay.”

They move back to the pillows and Erik offers Charles one of the extra blankets. 

Charles shakes his head, and shifts closer.

Erik follows his lead, and when they fall asleep they’re almost touching, shoulder to shoulder.

*

He’s only known Charles for a fortnight or so, if at that. It doesn’t stop Erik from smiling widely when Charles emerges from his last class of the day. It doesn’t prevent him from feeling warmed when Charles’s face lights up at seeing him waiting in the corridor. “You really didn’t have to,” Charles begins.

“It’s my pleasure,” Erik says as they set off. “Where to, now?”

He watches Charles open his mouth to speak - but whatever he wants to say is abruptly preempted by a cheerful and familiar voice.

“Oh my god, so it’s true!”

Charles raises an eyebrow at him.

Erik fights off the urge to blush, to hide, to protect himself.

And the next thing he knows, Raven is skidding to a halt on his other side, almost saucer-eyed with mirth and wonder. He’s not sure he’s ever seen someone smile so widely. 

Raven saves him from his mute surprise by poking him in the shoulder, harder than she’s ever done so before. “Introduce us, Erik!”

He almost chuckles, and covers that sound up with a cough, and he says, “Charles, this is my friend Raven; Raven, this is Charles Xavier, the Rose Groom.”

“Pleased to meet you,” Charles says with a bright smile. 

“Likewise,” Raven says, and then, “If you ever have any questions about Erik, let me know, okay? I know a little about him, and what I don’t know I can always make up.”

That makes Charles laugh, and then glance in his direction, and then try to smother that laugh by putting his hand over his mouth.

Erik sighs, and says, mock-solemnly, “You can laugh, really, it’s okay. She does it to me all the time.”

If the students milling around in the corridors and in the open spaces of the school had been looking at them before, they’re all staring now, because Charles makes an inquisitive face at Raven, and Raven winks broadly at him, and then they both break out in peals of laughter, bright chiming rising above the clamor of mere words.

Erik covers up his smile with a very put-upon expression, and trails after the other two as they weave a path out into the sunlight.

At some point that path takes him past a second-floor balcony, and on that balcony is Emma, who nods approval at him, just a slight bob of her head.

Standing next to her is a boy with a patrician nose and a solemn look in his eyes. Like Emma, he is armed. Unlike her, however, the boy wears two blades: there is a longsword at his left hip, and a knife at the right. At first glance, both blades seem to be old and worn and beautiful. 

The boy doesn’t acknowledge Erik beyond holding his gaze for a long moment, before turning smartly on his heel and disappearing into the building.

Eventually, Emma follows him in.

Charles doesn’t seem to have noticed them; he’s too busy listening to Raven, who, judging by the mischievous light in her eyes and the energetic waving of her hands, seems to be caught up in one of the long-winded silly stories that she makes up on the spot for anyone who happens to be listening to her.

Which is just as well, because that means Erik is free to watch their surroundings - and pretty soon he realizes why he’s been feeling wound up and tense, as if he’d been waiting for a blow - he quickly strides up to the other two, past them, putting them firmly behind him, and partly out of harm’s way, or so he hopes.

Azazel pushes off from the tree trunk that he’s been leaning against, and throws an insolent smirk in Erik’s direction as he plants himself right in their path. “Having a good day, then, Lehnsherr?”

“I was,” Erik says through gritted teeth, “until you showed up.”

“Just as I intended,” is the all-too-cocky reply. “Now - I believe you’ve got something that belongs to me. If you’ll kindly give Charles back - because he’s mine, he’s not yours, he belongs only to _me_ \- I’ll be more than happy to leave you and yours alone.

“If not - well.” Another smile. Too many teeth. “I do know how to make your life very miserable.”

“You’re not getting your grubby mitts on Charles,” Raven says, suddenly, and Erik looks over his shoulder to see her standing in front of Charles. Flashing eyes. Golden hair tossing in the breeze. She looks proud and determined, steel in every line of her, for all that she’s just minutes into her acquaintance with Charles. “I won’t let you.”

“Brave words,” Azazel sneers. “I remember you now, little chit. I made you cry. Are you such a glutton for punishment that you’ve come back for second helpings? Or perhaps you want something else - maybe I’ll think about it - ” 

He looks her up and down, his smirk twisting, turning into something _wrong_ \- too knowing, too ugly - and it sets Erik’s teeth on edge.

She growls, a wordless response, but she doesn’t back down, doesn’t look away.

Erik smiles though he can’t feel it, and he backtracks to Raven and touches her wrist as gently as he can. “I really appreciate you doing this, don’t you let yourself think otherwise,” he murmurs. “But this is really not your fight.”

“He’s right, Raven.” Charles comes forward, then, and he leans in to touch her other arm, at once conspiratorial and kind. “Azazel might be a bit of an idiot, but he _is_ bound by a set of rules. As are Erik and I. If there will be a fight, it will take place according to those rules. We’re just going to try and make it not come to that.”

“But - ” Raven frowns. “Okay, maybe you two know what’s going on, and Erik, you owe me explanations - just tell me, are you going to be all right?”

“Maybe,” Erik says grimly. 

“I do hope so,” Charles adds, sounding equally determined. “Please, will you step aside?”

She takes a deep breath, and briefly takes Erik’s shoulder in a strong grip, and moves away.

That leaves Erik looking into Charles’s eyes. “I’m assuming he has to say something.”

“Only if he wants a duel,” Charles says. “If he doesn’t - ”

“Then the rules don’t apply,” Erik finishes. “I get it. I know. Now what?”

Charles is silent for a moment. He bows his head, and his curls fall forward over his spectacles, briefly obscuring his eyes. “Do you trust me, Erik?”

He answers without hesitation. “Yes. I don’t know why, but yes.”

Charles is still looking down. “Thank you. Let me try something, all right? But be ready to say the words, just in case - ”

“I will. I know what to say. I’ll do it,” Erik says, all in one breath.

So he stands there, tense and waiting, as Charles walks away from him, walks toward Azazel.

The wind chooses that moment to pick up, and it lashes mercilessly at the trees overhanging the path - leaves rustling everywhere, overcoming the expectant hush of the watching crowd. 

Erik cannot hear the words that Charles is saying, but he can see every single one of Azazel’s reactions: the covetous grin he’d worn as Charles approached melts into a thin line, and then into the snarl of something small and frightened, cornered by a predator.

“...and Erik said he would break half your bones, and leave the rest to me,” are the words coming out of Charles’s mouth, when the wind dies down at last. “Tell me, though, Azazel: _why should I stop there?_ ”

Erik watches, fascinated, as Azazel’s eyes dart from Charles to himself and back again.

And then Azazel yells, inarticulate rage, and makes as if to lash out at Charles - 

Erik takes a step forward - 

Raven cries out - 

Charles holds his ground.

Azazel stops, and freezes, his face a rictus of fear and hatred - then he’s moving, he’s pushing Charles aside, and Erik has to take a long step to the left to get out of the way of his clumsy, barreling run.

Erik pays no attention to the angry shouts rising behind him, doesn’t notice the students who must have been watching everything or even Raven shooing them all away - he only has eyes for Charles, who is shivering when he gets to him. 

“I do believe,” the Rose Groom murmurs, “that we’ll be rid of him for another little while. He’ll be someone else’s problem for now.”

“What _else_ did you say to him?” is all Erik asks. He’s torn between wanting to pull Charles close, and letting him have his own space. The desire to protect Charles is warring with the need to admire him, because he’d had no need of Erik’s help at all, just now.

“I told him that I never thought of myself as his,” Charles says, “but that I was beginning to think about myself as _yours_.”

“Charles, I - ” Erik shakes his head, vehement, hoping to find the right words. “If you want to think of yourself as mine, that would make me happy, believe me. But - that’s not the really important thing. 

“The important thing is that you belong to yourself. Only you can decide whether you’ll be mine, or Azazel’s, or someone else’s. We can’t decide that for you. We don’t have that right. _You make that decision for yourself._ Do you understand? Ah, I’m doing this all wrong - ”

Before he can grope for the words that his Aunt Miriam might have used, before he can think about reassurance or encouragement - the things he remembers her for - Charles catches his shoulder, and Erik has very little warning before Charles pulls his glasses away and closes the distance between them.

Before Charles kisses him, right there in the open, heedless of watching eyes.

Right in the warm and sensitive place between Erik’s cheek and mouth.

Such a little thing, a kiss. Such an important thing. Here is Charles, still standing so close, with a sweet light in his eyes. Erik is pinned down, left speechless, stunned. He is alone with Charles in the world, in the intimate space between them.

“Thank you, Erik,” Charles says, at length. “I understand, truly. So I’m grateful. The others have been kind to me. Mostly. But you’re different, you’ve been different. You’re really not like anyone else I’ve ever met. And that has to be the nicest thing that anyone’s ever said to me.”

“If the others never told you that you were important, then they’re nothing but a pack of idiots,” Erik says, without thinking. “You deserve more than just nice. You deserve _everything_. The whole world.”

“Maybe I do,” Charles says, and he smiles, and looks up into Erik’s eyes, and Erik has to keep looking back at him, or else his feet will lift off the ground. 

**five: the student council president’s challenge**

“Welcome, Raven,” Charles says, and the door to the greenhouse creaks softly as it swings open. “It’s good to see you again.”

“Thank you for inviting me,” Raven replies, and then she adds, “Hi, Erik,” her voice coming closer and closer with every word.

Erik looks up briefly from the pages of his notebook, and waves an ink-stained hand in her direction. “You’re always complaining about the people in your dormitory being too noisy, so I asked Charles if it was okay for you to study here, with us.”

“And of course I said yes. You are more than welcome here.” A soft sound of running water underscores his words. “I will be with you in a moment; I just need to water the roses.”

“Do you grow all of these?” Raven asks, and Erik doesn’t have to look at her to know that she’s watching Charles’s every movement.

He does, after all, find himself doing the same thing, almost constantly - and yet he has yet to get tired of admiring Charles’s grace, the delicacy and sureness of his movements.

“Oh, I did not plant these roses; they were here when first I arrived at this school.” Charles’s voice seems to be coming from somewhere in the back of the greenhouse. “But they had been so terribly neglected and lonely and drooping. I decided I wanted to try and see if I could save them. I water them and trim them and sometimes I sing to them.”

“He has a lovely voice,” Erik mutters, not just to himself, and he scratches a word or two out and starts the sentence over. 

“Thank you, Erik,” Charles says. 

“Maybe next time I’ll be here when you’re in the mood to sing,” Raven says, sweetly encouraging.

“I’d love to sing for you some time, Raven.”

Not long after, the chair on Erik’s right moves, and he can see the blue of Charles’s jacket out of the corner of his eye, just a few inches away. 

“Now, how may I help you?” Charles murmurs.

“Erik said you understand physics better than he does, and I’m having some problems with one of the topics that we’re studying right now, and no one in the class can help me so I was hoping you could,” Raven says, all in practically one breath. “Exams are in a week, and I know everything else, it’s just this one thing - ”

“Catch your breath,” Erik says, trying to hide his smile by keeping his eyes on his paper, though from the small sound that Charles makes, he knows that he fails.

“Let me see,” Charles adds, and soon they’re all lost in the sound of fluttering pages and the click and pop of plastic calculator keys. “Oh, I see,” he says after a moment. “Did your instructor explain this formula to you?”

Erik looks up, just in time to watch as Charles circles something on his page with his finger. A fluid movement of wrist and hand.

“I’ve never seen that before,” Raven says. “It never came up in our lessons.”

“I think that is what you need to use to help you crack this difficult topic of yours,” Charles says. “Try it.”

“Thank you,” Raven says again. And: “Erik?”

“Mmm,” he says, tapping his pen on his page when he looks up. 

“He’s a better teacher than you are.”

“Of course he is,” Erik says, loyally. And: “I mean it, Charles.”

“He really does,” Raven laughs. “He usually loses his patience very quickly. Sometimes I deserve it, though. Maybe I’m just not getting the actual applications of physics. I’m much better with just the concepts.”

“Then perhaps,” Charles says, with a blush on his cheeks and a pleased light in his eyes, “we should encourage you to focus on the theory. Someone else can crunch the actual numbers for you, or we could just steal a supercomputer for you to use, if we couldn’t build it ourselves.”

Raven laughs, and Erik shakes his head fondly.

The next time he looks up, Charles is murmuring to himself in beautifully accented French.

The book in his hands has a very familiar name on the cover. 

He puts his pen down entirely, and glances at Raven before leaning in: she’s absorbed in her textbook; there is a line of ink on her cheek. To Charles, he whispers, “That’s the memoir, right?”

Charles nods, and flips back to the beginning of the book, though he keeps his place with his other hand. The quiet sound of him clearing his throat is Erik’s only warning, before Charles begins to read:

_La terre nous en apprend plus long sur nous que les livres. Parce qu’elle nous résiste. L’homme se découvre quand il se mesure avec l’obstacle. Mais, pour l’atteindre, il lui faut un outil. Il lui faut un rabot, ou une charrue. Le paysan, dans son labour, arrache peu à peu quelques secrets à la nature, et la vérité qu’il dégage est universelle. De même l’avion, l’outil des lignes aériennes, mêle l’homme à tous les vieux problèmes._

“From _Terre des hommes_ , translated into English as _Wind, Sand and Stars_. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.”

“Erik likes one of his other books,” Raven says, suddenly. “I think he carries it around with him everywhere.”

“I know,” Charles says. “That man had such a lovely mind, and led such a strange life, that allowed him to write all those stories of his. This is the one I happen to love, more than the rest - I love it almost as much as I do the pilot and his disappeared prince. _It is another of the miraculous things about mankind that there is no pain nor passion that does not radiate to the ends of the earth. Let a man in a garret but burn with enough intensity and he will set fire to the world._ ”

Erik blinks, and thinks of the tale of the woman who wanted to give the world freedom, and he catches his breath as quietly as he can, when that blue regard pins him down: thoughtful, deep, inscrutable. 

His hands are moving, as though heedless of his surroundings and the fact that Raven is now gazing at them both: he wraps Charles’s free hand in both of his own. There’s no strength in the grip at all, nothing to hold him back or pull him down. Just the gentlest touch that Erik can manage with his hands that are always clumsy, whether they be around a pen or a book or a sword.

The moment is interrupted when a boy with a shock of red hair knocks on the door of the greenhouse. “Is anyone here? Only I’ve got a message from someone wearing actual medals on their jacket, I didn’t know there were people like that around here - ”

“Excuse me,” Charles says, and he slips easily from Erik’s hands.

He comes back looking washed-out and grave. There is a heavy piece of parchment in his hands, sealed in black wax that bears the familiar impression of a rose. “I think,” Charles continues, “that I know what this is. But it is for you to open and read, Erik.”

Erik meets Raven’s wide eyes and hopes he looks reassuring; he feels anything but, though, and he slants a look at an equally worried Charles before he takes the letter and cracks the seal open.

_To the Champion, Erik Lehnsherr_

_I challenge you to a duel for the hand of the Rose Groom. You will have one hour to respond to this summons. I shall be waiting for you at the dueling circle._

_President of the Student Council of the Academy for Higher Learning - Sebastian Shaw_

“I am sorry, Raven, but I think you will have to excuse us again,” Charles says.

Erik twists the rose signet on his finger, once, twice, and gets to his feet. “Come with me, Charles?”

“Wherever you lead I will follow, Erik, and more than willingly.”

*

The unease pulls at Erik’s movements like millstones hung at his wrists and ankles, dangling from his shoulders - yet he knows from the look in Charles’s eyes that it’s time for the two of them to move: he catches Charles effortlessly in one arm, and draws the rose-ornamented sword from the heart of the Rose Groom.

“Grant me the power to bring World Revolution,” Erik growls. His heart is in his throat. There is fear in him. He doesn’t know how to fight with a sword. He knows very little about dueling; Hank, for all of his gawky shyness, is still more experienced than he is - and that’s without mentioning Azazel’s preference for that single-bladed sword of his, or Emma’s instinct for tactics.

He doesn’t know the first thing about defending the white rose in his jacket.

He doesn’t want to be away from Charles.

At the other end of the platform, the boy Erik had seen on the balcony with Emma draws his two blades with lightning-rapid motions, brisk and practiced - and he says nothing, only raises his right hand, so his longsword is pointed at the sky.

And then he charges.

Erik’s hand tightens on his sword - he glances back at Charles, who is getting to his feet, with the sun pouring light into his hair and throwing fiery flares from his collar and earring - but all he sees is Charles’s eyes, full of encouragement, full of resolve.

He sets his jaw and whirls away, just in time to avoid the twin blades heading for his throat. Somehow he manages to bring his sword back up in a complicated twist of a parry, somehow he swipes at his opponent’s wrist and throat and forces him well back.

He thinks of the ghostly image of his mother, who appears in his dreams again and again, leaping and dancing, the blade in her hand moving swift and sure through the air - and there is a distant part of him that is aware of his own efforts at trying to imitate her. 

Stroke for stroke. Thrust against thrust. Parry after parry.

His opponent is still better.

He’s given Erik his name: Sebastian Shaw, whose black rose is stark against his braid and ribbons.

Now Erik scrambles backward several steps, and still Shaw comes within an ace of cutting the white rose away. It makes him go cold all over, makes him _move_ : he dodges an attack from the dagger in Shaw’s off-hand, knocks away the pommel of the longsword with his own free hand.

Erik charges, Charles’s name his battlecry, and now he’s fighting with everything in him - he slashes at Shaw, again and again. His sword whistles through the air, speed and ferocity and madness. Attack and defense: the blade in his hands is his weapon and his shield.

Shaw pulls back, looking wary.

The tension in Erik pulls more and more tightly at him as he watches Shaw put his dagger away: the blade slides back into its scabbard, fierce rasp.

“The others have said that there is such raw potential in you,” Shaw suddenly says. “And I have made inquiries about you, Erik Lehnsherr. I confess that I am greatly impressed. Edie Hauptman was your mother, was she not? I commiserate with you on your loss - and at the same time I admire you, for her power has clearly been passed down to you. And you are far stronger than she was.”

Erik shakes his head. He doesn’t have time to listen to any speeches.

The longer he fights the more likely it is that he will lose. The certainty of this is in his bones, in every inch of his skin.

He has to finish this and stay by Charles’s side - but Shaw is still too quick for him, darting back in even as he speaks, the words powerful and unhurried, as though spoken over tea instead of in the middle of a ringing clash of swords:

“Have you ever thought of the world as an egg, Erik Lehnsherr? Have you ever thought about us, sleeping like a chick within that egg? Oh, it is a comfortable home that sustains us and nourishes us: but it can only be our home for a certain time. We are created to outgrow that egg. We must destroy that home, for it is only temporary. _If we don't crack the world's shell, we will die without ever truly being born._ This is why we struggle for World Revolution, Erik; this is why we fight for the hand of the Rose Groom. And someone with your potential, with your strength, can only be helpful in that struggle!”

Erik pushes him away with both hands, and roars back at him. “You talk about World Revolution and forget about your key! About what you must use to break that egg open! Well, you can fight for power or glory or fame; I’ll have nothing of it or you. My fight is for Charles alone: for he has the right to freedom as every one of us does. And I will strike down anyone who dares to stand between him and his right to make a choice!”

“You are brave and noble,” Shaw says. “And your words are full of passion and conviction. I can see why the others spoke so very highly of you. They have stepped out of the duels because they are convinced that the way to World Revolution has already been opened by your heart. 

“Now heed me well, Erik Lehnsherr,” he says, and he shoves Erik away, in a perfunctory manner. Calmly he steps backwards, moving to the center of the dueling circle: and then he puts the blade of his own sword to the black rose on his chest. “They are right, and I recognize your claim to World Revolution. I say that only your claim has merit. The rest of us must throw down our swords. The rest of us must forsake our roses. We will step out of your way, and will now fight for you. There is only one more test that you must overcome, and it will not take place in this circle. It must take place in your heart.”

“What are you talking about,” Erik yells in frustration.

“You are the true Champion now!” Shaw declares, his voice ringing with gravity and conviction. “You are the final Seeker of World Revolution. And here is your final test, the test that only you can face. _Beware the Rose Groom._ Beware the secret that he carries within him, the secret that he is hiding from you. Do you know what happens after a duelist seeking World Revolution takes his or her last victory? You do not. The Rose Groom does. _Ask him._

“And I wish you only the best of luck.”

Erik watches the movement of Shaw’s hand, and even as he begins to shake his head to deny what is about to happen, Shaw slices his own black rose away.

Black petals swirling to the white of the platform, flowing away on the sudden shifting wind.

**interlude one: the keepers and the wardens**

_I wonder, I wonder, I wonder what I wonder?_

_Oh hush. You know full well what is happening to this place. For so long have the walls held. For so long has this place been bolted and barred and closed. Things are different now, different, and new, and shaking. Things are uncertain now where they were once set in stone...._

_Now there is a door, and now there is a key for that door, and now there is one who might be able to open that door._

_Observe the Champion, and observe the Rose Groom. One is confused and afraid, and the other is resigned and fearful. This is the final test. This is the final obstacle._

_No one has ever come so close...no one has ever been so far away from World Revolution._

_A Champion who keeps his heart behind walls._

_A Rose Groom who lives in defiance of the walls set around him._

_Observe, observe. They pull toward each other, they pull away from each other._

_Nightmares for the Rose Groom. No one has ever declared for him like this. Long, long, long lives. This is completely new. This is completely different. This is something that he doesn’t know._

_His Champion is only human, and he does not know. But we know why he is the Champion, don’t we?_

_Yes, we do. He is careful, and he is gentle, and he is respectful. He has protected the Rose Groom with everything he has. And he continues to do so, even when he is so troubled. He offers comfort to the one who has always done the comforting._

_Year after year, the Rose Groom has sheltered others. Lifetime after lifetime, the Rose Groom has offered himself up for the happiness of others. Now there is someone who wants to do the same for him. Now there is someone who truly stands for him, who wants to stay by his side._

_For once it was said that_ To love is not to look at one another: it is to look, together, in the same direction.

_Perhaps they will find themselves more tightly entangled in the morning than when they fell asleep this night._

_Perhaps they will wake and look at one another, and then look, together, to the future._

**six: a birdcage for a prince**

Erik reaches out, tentatively, to the bookshelves in the main room of Charles’s quarters. Volumes upon volumes, and he does not recognize many of the titles. Many of the world’s languages are represented in gold or silver gilt, some of the letters peeling and flaking, some of them worn down to ghostly outlines. Only a bare handful of the books on the shelves seem new or untouched or little-read. It’s no wonder that Charles has to wear his eyeglasses everywhere, and even when he’s reading he occasionally has to squint at the pages in his hands.

There is an entire shelf devoted to Saint-Exupéry: each volume is bound in dark blue leather. Each spine is cracked and creased in various places. 

With great care, Erik extracts one of the books, and a startled little smile touches his face when he sees that he has found Charles’s own copy of _The Little Prince_. Dog-eared pages, underlined passages. It could have been the twin of Erik’s copy, which his Aunt Miriam had loved before passing it on to him. 

He thinks of Charles reading this book again and again, and eventually wearing the binding down - which makes him think about Charles’s hands carefully putting its pages and papers back together. 

Both inside covers are full of sketches of a familiar flower, petulant and vain and, in her own inimitable way, loving: here is the rose beneath her glass dome, and here is the rose behind the screen that shields her from the wind. The dome and the screen are expressions of love, manifestations of a desire to protect.

Erik thinks of his own reactions to the rose. Even with love showered upon her, even receiving all the adoration that she could have wanted, he remembers that she had insisted on brandishing her thorns, had wanted to keep her secrets hidden: until the moment when it was too late to think about even hinting at those secrets. 

A rose on a faraway asteroid, to whom the little prince may or may not have returned. It should have been a quick transit, painless, fleeting. 

And he is here, a Champion to a boy known as the Rose Groom, with walls growing between the two of them.

Still he thinks of Charles shivering in the night, of one or both of them making sounds that might have been sobbing and might have been pleading. Still he remembers that he’d been afraid to reach out for Charles until the very moment that he could no longer stop himself from making contact - and the result of that touch lingers in his skin. Warmth. Tremors. The soft wash of gentle breathing. Charles turning into his arms, his hands over Charles’s heart - and Charles’s hands interlaced into his.

There is a step behind him.

Erik takes a deep breath, and turns around slowly.

Charles looks tentative and strangely sweet in the pale morning sunlight. They’d woken up to a sky that was half overcast and half a cold faraway blue. Even now, Erik thinks that it might rain before the end of the day.

That doesn’t stop him from stepping closer to Charles, from offering him his hand - which hangs between them, alone, for a long moment - until Charles closes the distance. His fingers are cool in Erik’s.

“Let’s take a walk,” Erik says.

“All right,” Charles says. His eyes are downcast.

Erik misses the moods of his blue eyes, the mercurial shifts in them, the way they lit up and the way shadows fell into them, according to the emotions dominating Charles’s heart.

The day that they step out into is full of a watchful hush. Thunder is a distant muttering, far beyond the horizon. Even the vines and the duck pond are too still. No wind stirs.

The world outside the walls of the Academy might have vanished.

He has no idea where they’re going; he only knows that he walks by Charles’s side. He is focused on Charles, focused on the words of Sebastian Shaw. There is a secret that ties them together, a secret that makes them hold each other at arm’s-length.

Some of the illustrations of the rose in Charles’s book are so faded that only faint outlines of red and green remain.

“My mother - ” the words come out rough and abraded, and Erik clears his throat and starts over, and hopes he sounds gentler. “You said you’d heard of my mother,” he says. “Tell me what you know about her. I don’t have many memories of her left. Sometimes, I even think that the memories that I still have are little more than dreams, or things I’ve made up.”

Charles favors him with a sad smile. “The idea of kindness might have been made human in her,” he murmurs around a sigh. “In battle, she was fierce and relentless, but she was always rational, and she kept her head even when her opponent had lost his or hers. Outside of the battles, people spoke of her with warmth. She tried so hard to help people around her.”

“Did she succeed?”

“Most of the time.”

“I think there were days when she was upset,” Erik murmurs, “and she wouldn’t be able to eat anything except - ”

“- Except apples, yes, and then she still wouldn’t eat them unless she’d peeled them herself. I could never understand how she could get those long unbroken spirals, brilliant red against her white jacket. The pocket knife she carried with her had had the tip of its blade broken off.”

Erik blinks. 

The last time he’d seen that knife it had been in his father’s breast pocket, carried over his heart - he can still remember that the metal was always warm to the touch.

“That pocket knife that you just mentioned,” Erik says, slowly, sounding out the words. “It was my father’s. Or at least I remember that he was the one who carried it everywhere with him.”

“It was hers first,” Charles says. “It was made of steel and beechwood. A gift from her grandfather.”

“So when you say you’d heard of my mother - ” Erik begins.

“- I really meant that I had met her. That I’d known her personally.” Charles sighs again, more heavily this time. “That I’d spent time with her. She was one of the best duelists of her time.”

“She was fighting for your hand, too?”

Now Charles breaks away, and Erik, helpless, lets him go.

“Yes. It was a year in which they all believed that World Revolution was just out of reach. Seven of them with the rose signets on their hands, every single one a master in his or her own right. They were preparing to fight the final duels when the Academy was swept by a particularly virulent strain of flu. Hundreds of students died, and half of the duelists. Many of those who survived soon left the Academy, scarred from the ordeal, bowed by the grief of watching their classmates and teachers die. Too many lingering effects. Edie survived, of course, but her heart never quite recovered from the strain.” 

“And so she almost died giving birth to me,” Erik says. 

A cold wind springs up: it builds in strength and speed, and he has to brace his feet to stand in it, and it whips stray leaves and cut grass into his face.

Charles, in the center of the clearing, does not seem affected by the sudden change in the weather, save that the wind lashes cruelly at his hair, leaving it falling down into his face.

They are both silent and unmoving for what feels like a very long time.

Finally, the wind dies back down. A ray of weak sunlight falls among the trees.

“Is that the secret?” Erik whispers. “Is that what I have to find out? 

“Charles, tell me: how long have people been fighting for World Revolution?”

“How long have I been the Rose Groom?” Charles counters. “I know that’s your real question. And the answer to that is: _I don’t know_.” He turns back around to face Erik and takes his glasses off, folds them and stows them neatly away in his pocket. 

When he looks up again, there are lines in his face. Age and pain and regret and anger are mixed in his dark eyes. “I have been here for so long. I have been treated kindly and treated like an animal, and I have known gentleness and known contempt. I have been hurt and tended to, and all the while it has been my task to care for those who might seek World Revolution.

“Do you want to know who I am? I cannot help you with that. Do you want to know what I want? I will be compelled to answer that question, Erik, if you should ask it. And I will be compelled to watch and do nothing if you should walk away after you hear that answer.”

“What kind of answer is it,” Erik asks, helpless, trying to reach out to an unresponsive Charles.

“The unacceptable kind,” Charles says, cold and resigned. He touches the collar around his throat. “Follow me.”

The path takes them back towards their rooms, past the dueling circle and finally beyond it: to a white wall, its blank face broken by a single door. Erik has never noticed it before.

Charles shoulders the door open, easily, and he disappears into the darkness within.

Erik follows, blind and suddenly fearful. A short distance away from the door the path falls, down and down: a long winding spiral. 

Charles’s footsteps call hollow echoes up from the walls closing in on the two of them.

There is a faint light at first, and then it grows brighter and brighter. Flickering torches appear, hanging from brackets on the walls. 

Charles leads, and Erik walks after him, and finally the spiral ends in a short, straight spur that hangs over the edge of - nothing. An unimaginable depthless fall.

“Look there,” Charles says, and points across the narrow chasm.

A stone sarcophagus marked with the same stylized rose as on Erik’s signet. “Who is buried there,” he asks at last.

“Once upon a time there was a wise woman who had broken away from the shackles of the world,” Charles says, and it is as if the abyss responds to him, eerie echoes rising around them. “To give that freedom to all other souls she suffered herself to be bound once again. And she was more than imprisoned.”

“ _For with the cage that was set about her came the jeering and the thanklessness of all those that she had unbound,_ ” Erik whispers, remembering Charles’s story. “It wasn’t just a story.”

“It was never just a story. And you have not heard the final part of it. You asked if there was anyone who ever spared a thought for the suffering of that wise woman. So few of you who thought about that. So few.”

There is a terrible weight in the Rose Groom’s voice, and Erik has to force himself to listen to it, and to look back at him. “You.”

“Me,” Charles says. “When I was a little boy, heedless and reckless and dreaming of being a hero like the ones in the stories I’d read, I went searching for the wise woman. I found her, and I said that I wanted to help her. So here I am.

“I bear the weight of the world in her place.”

Charles’s hand, still pointing at the sarcophagus, moves up.

Reluctantly, Erik follows that movement.

What he sees comes to him in flashes and frozen images. A cage, not unlike the greenhouse with its roses, but this one is much smaller, and its bars are set close together. It is so cramped that it has barely enough space for its prisoner. 

Red outfit, white trim - and the whole ragged and unraveling. Golden collar. Golden earring. Dark brown hair, much longer, almost obscuring the prisoner’s face.

A soft breath that isn’t his and isn’t Charles. A minute shifting movement. The glitter of tears on pale skin, layer upon layer of bruises and wounds, ancient and new alike.

Charles’s face. The prisoner’s face. One and the same.

A boy imprisoned in a cage that hangs over an endless fall, guardian to a cold tomb.

Disbelief. Shock. Rage. 

Erik rasps out the question. “Charles?”

“Erik.” The voice of the Charles who stands next to him is brittle and bitter and broken. “This is what you’re fighting for. This is World Revolution: the wise woman’s strength, all of her wisdom and knowledge and power. With her dying breath she locked all of that inside me, and she decreed that another could change the world, if they were willing to prove themselves worthy. Hence the duels, and hence - me. The Rose Groom. The rose was the wise woman’s sign. 

“I am the vessel. I am the conduit. I am the prize.

“You wanted to know if anyone had ever won that immense power. The answer is still no - but even if someone had been able to win it, could you really imagine that this person would use that power to save me? 

“Of course not. The world shapes the people who live in it. And as they were ungrateful in the wise woman’s day, so are they now. They would have wished for their heart’s desire, and only that. Forgetting that the power would have come to them from a boy locked up in a cage.” 

Erik is silent. Fear grips his heart. Fear - and something else.

A realization: years upon years upon _lifetimes_. The unimaginable weight of the world laid upon Charles’s shoulders, the burden of its lack of faith. Grief and pain and despair.

“What are the rules governing World Revolution?” Erik asks, at last.

When Charles responds, it is in a near monotone. “There are none. Have you not been paying attention? It is absolute power. And if you claim that power you can do whatever you want with it.”

“Can World Revolution affect you?”

“Yes. _If_ the one who claims it wills so.” Charles’s voice hardens with the next words. “You do not know what you are asking, Erik.”

“I think I do. Unless you don’t want to be free.” Erik turns away from the tomb, from the cage, and looks at the Charles who is standing next to him.

“And then what? Are you planning to take my place? Do you want to become the next prize, fought over and tossed from hand to hand? There are duelists like you and your mother, like Emma - but there are very, very few of you who are truly noble. The rest are like Azazel and Hank and Sebastian: incapable of perceiving truths. Each is blind in his own way. Azazel only sees himself. Hank can only see theories. Sebastian refuses to see anything else but his perfect vision of a perfect world. 

“Do you want to subject yourself to an endless succession of people like that?”

“If it means your freedom - ”

“Don’t give me that, Erik!” The echoes from the abyss turn into angry whispers. “Don’t you understand? I want you to free me! I want to be free of this place, I’ve been locked in here for such a very long time - and yet I cannot ask you to do it! Not if it means _you_ will be imprisoned in my place. Not if it means _you_ must suffer as I have! Ask me to do anything, Erik, and I will do it, because you have been kind and good and you have told me that I belong to myself - but don’t ask me to see you in that cage!”

“Charles,” Erik whispers - and he reaches for Charles just as Charles reaches for him.

They hold each other, on the edge of the chasm.

“I’d do anything for you,” Charles says, so quietly that Erik has to strain to hear the words. “Anything, Erik.”

“And I would do anything for you, Charles.” Erik steels himself. The fear is gone, now, and in its place is pure resolve. Pure determination. And something that he dares not name, but that he understands is not something that can be so easily put into words: more than just the devotion of a prince to his rose, more than just a yearning for a sunset - passion and pain combined and transformed into something much greater. “So let me claim World Revolution. Let me change the world. We’ll find a way. You and I, together: the world cannot stand against you and me.”

“Erik,” Charles says again.

Whatever else he might have to say is drowned out by a quiet but powerful sound: a strange, piercing _crack_.

Suddenly the chamber explodes with light, far more intense than the flickering torches, brighter and more brilliant than starlight or the sun.

“Charles, what’s going on - ” Erik begins - but looking down into the other boy’s eyes means he can also look down at the light that is growing between them, bright sparks over their hearts, sharp and familiar.

“You too, Erik - ” Charles says, sounding utterly shocked. 

Power, potential, and the sense of doing something _right_.

Erik reaches for Charles’s heart, as Charles reaches for his.

He watches Charles’s hand close around the grip of a sword, pale skin against dark cord wrapped around steel; he fits his own hand beneath a cup-shaped hilt in plain gold, not unlike the collar Charles wears.

He looks up again, and takes in the look in Charles’s eyes, and he nods in reassurance. “We can do this,” he says, and though the words are quietly spoken, Charles seems to hear him clearly.

“Because we’re together,” is Charles’s answer, and slowly, slowly, they draw apart - drawing swords from each other.

The blade that Charles draws from Erik’s heart has two cutting edges and an S-shaped crossguard; the blade that he draws from Charles’s heart is long and slender and terminates in a sharp point.

“This is something that has never happened before,” Charles says, shakily, once they’re standing side by side again, staring at their swords. “I didn’t even think that I could have a heartsword - there was always just one sword, the wise woman’s, the sword that is normally drawn from the Rose Groom - ”

Erik smiles, encouragingly, and wraps his free hand around Charles’s grip on his sword. “We’re changing the world already. You and me. One step at a time.”

**seven: kiss from a rose**

“Do you have to go to class today?” Erik asks the next morning.

The golden sunlight falling in wide bars across the rumpled bed allows him to see the expressions crossing Charles’s face: surprise, fondness, understanding.

Erik clenches his hands in the sheets. It’s an unreasonable request, and he knows it. He has to get ready for a series of examinations. Charles has several papers to write. They have to help Raven with the rest of her homework. 

But Charles’s smile is gentle and knowing when he shakes his head. “I should. But I can choose not to. I can choose to stay with you.”

“Thank you,” Erik says, and he can relax back into the pillows, in tiny degrees and increments.

He watches as Charles sets aside the towel that he had been using to dry his hair, as Charles climbs back into their bed.

This morning, they’d woken up holding each other, face to face. He’d been clutching Charles around the waist, and Charles had caught him up by the shoulders. Their legs had been tangled in an ungainly knot. Their shared warmth had filled the few spaces between their bodies.

Now, he opens his arms to Charles and they stretch out again, together, pressed back to front. Erik is the big spoon, and Charles tilts his head back to rest against Erik’s shoulder. 

Erik finds that he doesn’t mind the damp, if it means he can breathe in the scent of clean skin, of Charles’s shampoo that smells like strawberries.

They join hands. The movement is as easy as breathing, as easy as though it’s something they’ve done every day of their lives.

Charles radiates the warmth of his bath and the warmth of his own skin, and he angles his toes into another patch of sunlight.

It’s hardly the first time that Erik has noticed Charles’s need to be warm: he knows about the gloves that Charles carries around in his pockets, and he knows about Charles’s tendency to huddle in his blankets. He knows about how Charles leans toward people, not just to show interest in them, but also to soak up the warmth that they give off. 

Slowly, the question forms in his mind, and slowly, he gives voice to it. “Are you really just cold all the time, or does this have anything to do with - ” A pause. He thinks of words to describe what he’s seen: the copy of Charles in the tattered red jacket. “With the other you?”

“Can’t it be both?” Charles whispers. His hands squeeze Erik’s, unexpected strength, welcome.

“Yes, it can,” Erik says. He gets up, just for a moment, and gathers all the blankets, and piles them on Charles’s other side. “Better?”

A soft sigh. Charles’s weight leaning back into him. “Yes. Very much.”

For a long time, there is a companionable silence that is only broken by the ticking of the clock on Erik’s nightstand.

“It’s strange,” Charles says. He is still whispering, and Erik has to lean forward a little, hook his chin over Charles’s shoulder, to make sure he hears every word. “I’ve seen so many things. I know stories that would make you weep, and I know stories that would freeze the very blood in your veins. I’ve known people, and that means I’ve known their lives, the parts of them that they share with me and show me.

“I thought I’d seen it all, the dark parts always overwhelming the good - and then. Something happened yesterday. Was it only just yesterday? It feels like something that is happening right now, and something that happened a hundred thousand years ago. You drew a sword from me that was not the sword in my keeping. You drew the sword of my heart.”

“And you drew mine,” Erik says.

“I did.”

Before Erik can ask the necessary next question, Charles takes a deep breath, and keeps talking. “Heartswords are - like keys,” he begins. “Which is an idea that is both simple and complicated, if you think about it.”

Erik thinks back to Hank’s explanation. It feels like ages since that conversation took place. “You explained World Revolution to me in the context of a locked room. The key, the door, and the opener of the door.” 

“That’s the beginning of the idea, yes.” Charles squeezes his wrist, briefly. “The key, in this case, is in two parts. There’s me, and there’s the sword - the one with the wise woman’s rose on it. The room cannot be unlocked without the two parts of the key.”

“And to obtain the key?”

“In my case, a handful of chosen people had to fight each other. They had to duel for my hand. But if you really want to think about it, Erik, I wouldn’t be the only one in that kind of situation, would I?”

“I don’t think you’re talking about the situation of being in a cage.”

“I am,” Charles says. “Think about it, Erik. People place limits on themselves. They build walls. They separate themselves from others.” He turns around, and smiles, and the smile on his face is full of an ancient understanding that Erik is only now beginning to truly fathom. “But these same people also hold the keys to their own prisons. I learned that from a wise boy, who likes Saint-Ex as I do.”

He can’t help himself: Erik chuckles. He also feels his own cheeks heat up under Charles’s dark blue scrutiny, so much so that he has to look away, look down.

Except then his eyes catch sight of Charles’s mouth, those slightly parted lips, and he has to catch his breath and close his eyes.

Sometimes he catches himself thinking of Charles’s kiss - of the way Charles had kissed him, so careful, never presuming. Charles hadn’t kissed him on his mouth at all; perhaps he understood, in his own way, that Erik has never been kissed by someone who isn’t family.

Still, Charles’s kiss had been so warm.

“ - Erik?” Charles is saying.

Erik blinks, and focuses back on the other boy’s eyes. 

“Are you all right?” Charles asks, squeezing him lightly around the waist.

“I’m okay,” Erik says, and then, remembering what Charles had been saying, adds, “I wouldn’t really call myself _wise_ , there are too many things that I don’t know - ”

“You already know something essential,” Charles says. “It’s something to start with.”

“...I guess.” Erik goes over the past few minutes, trying to figure out what Charles is trying to say. “So - the heartswords. What are they? The keys to our prisons?”

“And the keys to ourselves.” Charles snuggles closer, and for a moment, Erik rues the fact that this means Charles leaning in so Erik can’t see his face - but it also means Charles resting his cheek against Erik’s chest, and that feels good, too, so Erik curls in on him as well, trying to get closer and closer still. “Keys which can be revealed to others, either on purpose or by accident. Or we can give other people our keys.”

“You’re forgetting one thing, Charles: people can take our keys, too.”

“I know, Erik. We took each other’s keys, didn’t we?”

“ - We did. We gave them to each other.”

Charles laughs, delighted, though the sound is muffled in Erik’s shirt - but when he speaks again, he sounds dead serious. “For what it’s worth, Erik, as shocked as I was that it was you - I’m glad, too. That’s the more important thing: that it was you who took a key from me. I’d do anything for you, Erik. I think I said that yesterday.”

“And I would do anything for you, Charles. The key to me is yours.”

Charles chooses that moment to look back up.

Erik looks him in the eyes, and almost forgets to breathe.

His hand, unbidden, slips up Charles’s arm, his shoulder, until his fingertips brush over Charles’s cheek.

He watches, amazed, as Charles leans into that featherlight touch.

The words fall from his lips, unbidden, and true. “I fight for you. For your freedom. Even when that freedom might mean that you’ll walk away from me.”

Charles’s eyes flutter closed, and he leans closer, and whispers to Erik. “Freedom - then, can I do this, let me do this - ”

Erik’s eyes being wide open, he can see Charles shift upwards, just a little. He can watch as Charles draws closer and -

Warmth, Charles’s mouth, touching Erik. Charles’s lips on his.

Erik pulls away, wide-eyed, and Charles’s eyes fly open too.

Erik speaks first: “You wanted to kiss me?”

“I did,” Charles says. His face falls, a little. “I’ve wanted to. Did you not want me to - ”

Erik cuts him off, a little clumsily, the only way he knows how.

Charles sighs, soft and sweet puff of breath against Erik’s mouth, and kisses back, intent and insistent.

Erik thinks of being overwhelmed, willingly, when he feels Charles’s hands move: one comes to a stop between his shoulder blades, and the other catches lightly - so lightly - at his hair, just above the nape of his neck.

When he copies Charles’s movements Charles groans, and the vibration of it rocks Erik’s nerves, leaves him weak and wound up all at the same time.

He’s expecting more, something else, even if he can’t come up with anything better than this - but what he gets instead is Charles drawing back, gentle, but inexorable. 

Erik hears an unhappy noise - and then, his brain catches up with him and he realizes that _he_ made that sound.

Even with the stern expression on his face, Charles is almost incandescent in his arms - bright light in his blue eyes, bright laughter spilling from his kiss-warmed lips. “Catch your breath, Erik,” he says.

“Why did you stop,” Erik says, pleading, almost a groan.

Charles reaches out to him, cups his fingers around Erik’s jaw, and Erik, helpless, can only lean into that fleeting touch. “Because I want to know if you know what you’re doing, Erik. If you know what you want. I know what I can do with you. I know what I can show you. But I can know all of that and still not know what _you_ want. So I have to stop. So we have to talk.”

The world filters back in, and Erik blinks, and he’s aware of how close they are, of what they’ve been doing, of the way he’s holding on to Charles. He can’t see how his hands have gone white-knuckled, but he can feel the tension in them, the tremors in his fingers. 

And he can feel the imprint of those kisses on his mouth, every single one of them. His first kisses.

“You can hold on to me for as long as you want,” Charles says. “And I will hold on to you. As for the rest - ”

“I don’t know anything about the rest, Charles,” Erik says. He shakes his head. He’s heard people talking around him, in class or outside of it. He’s never joined in those conversations. All he has are vague ideas and fleeting wishes. “I don’t know, and I think you do. And that’s - that’s the part where I trust you.”

There is a long pause, and Erik watches Charles blanch and then blush, watches as a wondering light comes on in his eyes. “Say that again,” Charles says, eventually, though once he starts to speak the words tumble out in a rush. “I need you to be sure, Erik - ”

He catches Charles’s hands, presses kisses over the knuckles. When he hears Charles draw a ragged breath in response, he shivers - and keeps going. “I trust you to know what to do. To show me. To be here with me.”

“I - Erik - ” 

Charles’s mouth comes down upon his again, and these kisses are storms, are livewires crackling in Erik’s mind and threatening to tear him apart. These kisses catch at Erik, leave him reeling, make him want more. 

By the end he’s broken and battered and clinging to Charles.

And Charles is clinging to him, too - pressed full-length against Erik, the two of them chest to chest, their quick gasping breaths washing over each other’s faces.

“You really do mean it,” Charles says, flushed and breathless. “Oh, Erik. I don’t know what to say or do - will you tell me, will you let me know, if we do something you don’t like? Will you give me that?”

Erik nods, not trusting his voice. 

Charles traces around his mouth with one finger, and Erik lets him, content to be transfixed. Every inch of his skin is lit up, and all he can feel is that soft pressure on his lips. It seems right to want more and do more at the same time. To open his mouth and capture Charles’s fingertip.

Charles nods encouragement, and Erik takes the entire finger in, swipes his tongue down the length of it, experimenting.

His reward is Charles’s mouth dropping open, is the helpless sigh that escapes him. “Oh - that’s good - ”

Erik sucks, then, hollowing his cheeks, licking at nail and knuckle. He can see Charles trembling as a result of his actions, and he catches Charles’s wrist in a gentle grip, so he can feel those little shivers wracking Charles’s frame.

“Erik - stop - ”

He pulls off with alacrity, reaches for Charles’s cheek with his free hand. “Are you all right?”

“I - better than all right - only - too much - ”

Erik smiles, startled, incredulous. “That’s good, right?”

“Yes,” and then Charles _moves_.

Erik finds himself flat on his back, finds Charles bent over him, very nearly close enough to kiss - but Charles’s hands are firm on his shoulders, holding him down, preventing him from closing that gap between them. “Erik. Please. Let me - ?”

There’s nothing else he can say, then. “Charles - I - yes. I want you to. Whatever you want. _Please._ ”

Charles draws closer, closer, and Erik takes in a breath that is heavy with the scent of him. Erik only has eyes for Charles’s blown pupils, the tantalizing deep blue little more than a thin rim around beautiful dark depths. Every nerve in his body can feel the hot weight of Charles’s hands.

A brush of a kiss, a tease, and then that blazing touch shifts lower. Erik sucks in his breath, and almost can’t: Charles’s mouth on his throat, ghosting over the hollow between his collar bones. 

“Can I?”

There’s a weight off Erik’s shoulders, Charles freeing one hand so he can tug on the collar of Erik’s shirt with two fingers.

“Will you let me?”

Erik nods, because he doesn’t honestly have any other answers. All he wants to do is _feel_ \- though he does unstick his tongue long enough to ask, “You too?”

“Me?”

Erik pulls at the hem of Charles’s shirt.

“Oh! Of course.”

When both of them are partly bared to each other, Erik sits up, and Charles sits more comfortably in his lap. Erik brushes his hands quickly up and down Charles’s torso, fascinated by the constellations of his freckles. He’s like a galaxy in reverse, dark stars in pale skin - and he tells Charles so, as soon as he catches his breath.

“You’re not so bad yourself,” Charles answers, laughing.

Erik smiles, and angles up for a kiss - Charles obliges, but kisses him on his nose, and Erik makes a frustrated sound.

“All in good time,” Charles says, and he’s as good as his word - better, because the next time they kiss Charles opens his mouth to do so.

Erik’s eyes fly open, but this time he doesn’t break away - he just watches, startled and shivering and needy, as Charles hums and nips at his mouth, soft indent of teeth into his bottom lip.

He opens his mouth as well, and in the process his tongue darts out to lick at the corner of Charles’s lips.

Charles pulls away, mischief and sweet desire in his eyes, and murmurs, “Hold on tight, my Erik.”

He does - he gets a good grip on Charles’s hips - and Charles catches his face in both hands, holds him still, kisses him again and again. Charles’s tongue strokes his, encouraging and demanding at the same time, and Erik keeps up as best as he can. They shiver and they cling to each other, heat building between them in long and slow pulses of time.

Erik moves, pure instinct driving him. He pushes his hips upwards.

Charles tears away. Disheveled and panting and kiss-flushed. “Erik. Is this what you want?”

Erik blinks at him, and nods. “If it’s all right, if you’ll let me - ”

“ _Yes._ Like this - ” Charles adds, and they’re lying down again, on their sides and facing each other, straining together, connected and bound to each other. The need that they share is a wildfire that consumes them completely. 

Charles yanks at his hair again, and Erik makes all kinds of encouraging sounds. Closer, closer: they push at each other, pull each other closer. Breathless movement, heartbeat after heartbeat, their voices rising and falling in their need.

Erik dares, and strokes his hands down Charles’s sides, lingering at his waist and then moving lower. Slow, giving Charles every opportunity to tell him to stop - but Charles does exactly the opposite. He pleads with Erik, calling him onwards. Hands catching at him in return. 

Charles winds one leg around both of Erik’s, whispering, “ - Yes, ah - _there_ \- ”

Erik spreads his fingers to cup Charles’s bottom - and Charles reacts almost instantly, freezing for just a second in his arms before he shivers and moans softly, mouth hanging open against Erik’s throat.

Charles’s high makes Erik gasp, and duck his head to steal a kiss from that slack, swollen mouth - and when Charles licks lazily at his lips Erik follows him over that edge, falling, whispering Charles’s name, over and over again.

**interlude two: crimson waltz**

_There is a commotion in the ballroom that sprawls out below them, and Shaw raises a curious eyebrow as heads turn toward the staircase leading down to the dance floor. “What is that noise, Emma? Who is arriving?”_

_A raised eyebrow. A glance over golden epaulettes. Emma strides to the banister; the crisp and precise movement, as orderly as a soldier on parade, should have clashed with her unbound hair and the necklace of dark green jewels clasped around her throat. It should have looked odd given her diaphanous dress, her layers of skirts, a dress version of her usual duelist’s jacket - but she makes it all look perfect, as she is wont to do. “The Champion and the Rose Groom are here,” she announces with a smile. “You should see Charles’s face. I’d say it’s the first time I’ve ever seen him happy, truly happy.”_

_Shaw smiles back, but only for a moment; then his expression turns stern and resolute, and he spears Azazel, who is skulking behind them, with a scathing glance. “You know what you must do. Make that apology, Vice President. Say your piece and make sure that the entire school can hear you.”_

_“And then you will look after Miss Raven’s well-being for the rest of the night, or until she sees fit to dismiss you,” Emma adds. There is a terrible - and to all of them on the balcony, entirely too familiar - strength beneath her matter-of-fact tone. “You will bear all of her reactions and all of her words with patience and forbearance. You have done her a great and grievous wrong, and we have been remiss in redressing it. You will do so now, and you will make it good.”_

_“I don’t know if I can - ” Azazel begins. He shifts from foot to foot in his suit, formal black from head to toe._

_Shaw cuts him off with a quick gesture. “If it had been truly up to me, Azazel, I’d have had you do something else. Something worse. As it is, this is all we can ask of you.” He takes a deep breath. “Emma is right, you know,” he says, more quietly, as he clasps his hands behind his back. “You’ve let your position go to your head. The Azazel I knew, when he and I were boys growing up and dreaming of becoming heroes, would never have had to resort to bullying to make his arguments. He would never have struck anyone for the sake of striking them. He would have remembered to respect others, in order to win their respect for himself.”_

_The blood drains out of Azazel’s face, and a complicated series of shadows, as of memory and of shame and of regret, flits across his eyes - and then he bows his head, turns smartly on his heel, and leaves. They can hear his footsteps, steady and resolute, going downstairs._

_“There he goes,” Hank mutters, watching intently as the crowd parts to reveal Raven standing next to Charles and Erik. His jacket stretches nicely across his shoulders; still he looks - and acts - uncertain. His hands clench and unclench into fists at his sides. “Do you think that we might be going too far?”_

_Emma shakes her head. “We’re not going far enough,” she says, simply. “The first time I saw the bruises on Charles’s wrists, the welts on his face - the first time I heard of a girl being mistreated - we should have done something, then. We’d been entrusted with the task of protecting the Academy: protecting all of the students within its walls. We did nothing of the sort; we stood idly by: we failed them, because we lost sight of what we needed to do.”_

_“So focused on what Charles represents, that we lost sight of Charles himself,” Shaw adds. The torches flicker, and there are odd new lines in his face. “So focused on leading that we forgot what we were supposed to be doing. We were supposed to be the leaders of the school, first. We were so blinded by the good we thought we could do once we claimed World Revolution, that we forgot what good we could do in the moment.”_

_The ballroom stills, and they can hear the awkward hitch in Azazel’s words clearly: “ - present my apologies to - ”_

_The three of them watch Raven and her reactions: the aborted movement backwards, unconsciously pulling away from the boy who’d wronged her. The way she looks over her shoulder to Charles and Erik. Even from here, they can see how the Champion’s and Rose Groom’s hands are tightly intertwined, the skin stretched tight over Erik’s knuckles._

_And then, entirely on her own, Raven holds up a hand, and Azazel stops dead in mid-syllable. She speaks, and they, too, hang on her words, as does the rest of the school: “Apology accepted, on one condition. You will have to make this same apology, with this same sincerity, to every single other person whom you’ve hurt. And I know exactly who deserves a greater apology than I do. You can start with him.”_

_Raven steps aside, and then Azazel is pinned under the cool blue gaze of Charles Xavier._

_“Is it just me,” Hank mutters, almost to himself, “or does Azazel seem to be, I don’t know, sort of shrinking?”_

_“It’s not just you, and it’s not just him,” is Shaw’s answer. “I feel like I have been cut down to size, too. Deservedly so.”_

_“We have to do better,” Emma says. “We have to do more than just stand aside for Erik and Charles to open the door to World Revolution.”_

_“Agreed,” Shaw says. “We must pledge our complete support.”_

_“They’ve always had mine,” Hank says. And then he blushes a bright red. “I’m sorry. I’ve spoken out of turn.”_

_Emma comes up to him. Even when she towers over many of the students at the Academy, she still needs to wear high-heeled shoes to look him in the eyes, as she does now. “No, Hank, I think that was the right thing to say. It would have ended that way, eventually, once we got over ourselves, once it was clear that all of the duels had been won. Once we could understand that a true Champion had emerged.”_

_Eventually, the orchestra tucked into one of the alcoves strikes up a waltz, and Erik Lehnsherr bows over Charles Xavier’s hand, inviting him to dance._

_Charles’s smile eclipses the blaze of lights in the ballroom as he accepts, and the two of them begin to step together, neatly moving past a still-flustered Azazel. Together they whirl over the floor as if there is no one else with them, as if they cannot see the couples forming up all around them, as if the music and the dance are only theirs._

_Emma is the first to laugh, later, and clap her hands, when Raven attempts to cut in on Charles and Erik - and finds herself pulled towards them, instead, so it’s a three-way dance, strange and startling and sweet._

**eight: the door, the key to the door, and the opener of the door**

When the bells of the Academy begin ringing to mark the end of another day of classes, Erik stops pacing around the rosebushes, and looks back at the table and its tea service.

The teacups are untouched, the steam that had been rising from them long since dissipated. The sandwich he’d passed to Charles still only has the one bite taken out of it.

There’s a soft, uncertain _thump_ : Charles’s copy of _Terre des hommes_ being laid down next to his saucer. He folds his hands together on one knee. 

A long moment of silence passes before Charles whispers, “It’s time.”

“I know.” Erik takes a deep breath. “I will go where you lead me, Charles,” he says, as gently as he can. “You’ll have to tell me what to do. Where to go. We agreed that this would be the day - ”

“ - That this would be the day when you’d claim World Revolution. Yes.” Charles gets to his feet, and moves forward, and Erik turns toward the door, waiting for Charles to stand at his side.

But Charles comes to a stop just behind him, so close that Erik can feel not just the warmth he’s radiating but his nervousness as well, and he begins to look over his shoulder. “Charles?”

“No, please, could you just - stay as you are,” Charles says, and Erik, apprehensive, looks back at the closed door.

Here are Charles’s arms around his waist. Here is the softness of Charles’s cheek against his jacket, in the space between his shoulder blades. He’s reminded of this morning, waking up almost exactly like this, only they hadn’t been wearing anything then.

They are wearing jackets and all of their layers now.

Erik puts one hand over both of Charles’s, which are joined just below his heart. “I’m afraid, Charles. I don’t know what we’re about to do.”

“I must have always known that it’d come to this,” Charles answers, faintly. “But - hundreds of years, Erik. I’ve been waiting for so long, that the waiting is all that I’ve ever known. Now, the right time has come. Now, there is a Champion. Now, you and I must open the door. And I am afraid, too, Erik. I know only where to go. What happens after that - ”

“What happens after that,” Erik says, trying to put all of his conviction in his voice, all of the emotions that he feels around Charles, all of the things that Charles makes him feel, “we will face together. It’s not just you any more, Charles. I’m here. I’m with you. And you’ve got me. I made you a promise.”

“...Yes,” Charles says, eventually. 

Time stands still in the greenhouse, when the bells fall silent at last, when the sunset gilds the roses blooming all around them.

When Charles finally lets him go and steps around to face him, Erik can see the white roses in his hands, and he smiles as Charles fixes one of them into his jacket. “And the other one?”

“The other one is for me,” Charles says, and offers him the second rose. “Will you help me put it on?”

Erik smiles, and takes the rose - and gets down on one knee. 

Charles blushes, and shivers, and doesn’t look away.

“Kiss me,” Erik murmurs once he’s done pinning the rose onto Charles’s chest, white against blue. His words are a gentle request.

Charles’s fingers find Erik’s temples, fierce warmth and fiery connection between them, and Erik’s hands come up to Charles’s wrists seemingly of their own accord. The kiss consumes all.

“Now I’m ready,” Erik says, when they finally break apart.

“And so am I,” Charles says, touching his rose with careful fingertips.

The door to the greenhouse closes behind them, silently.

Hand in hand. One foot in front of the other. Back through the door in the wall: back down the spiraling steps - but this time, the path doesn’t end just over the edge of the abyss.

This time, the path has turned into a narrow bridge, just wide enough for one person to walk across.

“Charles,” Erik says. “What do I do?”

The voice that answers him is cold and almost, _almost_ familiar: “Are you the Champion?”

Erik looks to his left: Charles’s hand over his mouth. His pale face. His eyes, looking up.

He follows the direction of Charles’s glance and - 

The cage on the other side of the chasm is empty.

That other voice speaks again, sweetly mocking: “Declare yourself, if you are the Champion - there is one more thing that you must do - ”

“Erik, I - I think I know what’s going on,” Charles says urgently. He points to the other end of the bridge. “Look.”

Erik looks.

The boy who has appeared on the other side should have looked like Charles’s twin; they should have been identical down to the last freckle, the last curl of dark hair.

But _this_ boy has blank blue eyes, and his lush mouth is fixed in a spiteful sneer, and the too-vivid red of his jacket and trousers only reminds Erik of a long-distant day of spilled blood and tears and loss.

“Hello,” Charles’s - twin? copy? - drawls. “For the last time, I ask: _are you the Champion?_ Answer me truly, or else be gone. Darkness awaits to take you completely, if you have no business being here.”

Erik swallows back the sudden fear that makes him go cold, that makes him grip fervently at Charles’s hand, and answers at last: “I am the Champion, and I have come to claim World Revolution.”

“Then you face your final test, if you really are the Champion you claim to be.

“That final test - is me.”

“You’re not Charles,” Erik says, shaking his head.

“Oh, I’m not the boy at your side, you can be sure of that. I’m not modest or shy or gentle - I’m not _weak_ , not like your Rose Groom,” and the twin’s lips curl around the title in a way that makes it sound like an obscenity. “I am far more powerful. I am someone else entirely. Because the power of World Revolution is within me. I’m the locked room. And the only way to break through, the only way to get in, is to destroy me - which means, Champion, that you will have to destroy your Charles, too.”

Erik stares at the copy of Charles for a moment longer, and then he makes a decision: he takes a deep breath, and smiles at the Charles who stands pale and trembling at his side, and turns his back on the other side of the bridge. 

There is something wrong about looking into the blue of Charles’s eyes and finding hatred and fear, all-consuming, like a wall that he could die dashing himself against.

He watches with bated breath as Charles glares at his own doppelganger for one moment more, before he follows suit, and turns away.

“That’s not going to work,” the boy who is not Charles taunts. “You both know I’m still here.”

“But I can choose to ignore you,” the real Charles says, mostly under his breath. “And I know I have a choice. I understand that.”

“Yes,” Erik says. And: “Who or what _is_ he, Charles? He says he’s you.

“Is he?” 

In the silence that follows that question, the whispers begin again: a confusing babel of voices, Charles’s voice multiplied a thousand times: the voice that reads Saint-Exupéry to Erik in the original French. The voice that sings quietly in the greenhouse and outside of it. The voice that speaks gently to Raven and to the members of the Student Council.

The voice that calls Erik’s name.

The voices shift and change and twist in on themselves: now they whisper of fear and of hatred and of pain; now they speak of determination and hope and love.

A thousand voices, a thousand emotions, every possible variation of Charles.

“Yes,” Charles says, finally.

“Charles,” Erik says, lost.

“He is the me that is the prisoner. The Rose Groom in his cage entwined with thorns.” The look in the real Charles’s eyes is now almost as blank as that in his copy’s. “The wise woman’s torments were, and still are, mine to bear, Erik. The physical torments, and the ones that eat away at the mind. He is the me who has lost hope. He is the me who knows nothing but pain. He is the me who has never had a choice.”

The sound of distant weeping rises up around them.

“How is it,” Erik asks, hesitantly, “that you are you and he is - what he is?”

“I don’t know.”

“What makes you different from him - what makes it so that you are the one holding my hand? What makes it so that when I wake up in the mornings you are warm and holding me close? What makes it so that you can chase away my nightmares with a kind word and a kiss? _What makes you Charles?_ ”

“I don’t know, Erik!” Charles wrenches away, then, steps back towards the spiral stairs. His shoulders are hunched over. Erik can see that he has covered his face with his hands.

Now the voices echo the fear in Charles’s voice: wailing and pleading and sobbing.

Erik reaches out for Charles, and stops short, and whispers, “You are you alone, Charles - you are the Rose Groom, the real one, the one who carries all that pain and still cares so much. And I am _your_ Champion - I am not his! I don’t know him, even though you tell me that the two of you have been tormented. I don’t know him, even though he wears your face and knows things about you. I don’t know him, and I don’t care about him - I’ll fight him. I’ll defeat him.

“But I won’t be able to do that without you. I need your help, Charles. He is the locked door and we can only get in if we are together. The door, the key, the opener. I cannot do this alone, Charles! It can’t be just me! Alone, I’ll fail, I know that as I know what I feel for you.”

Erik closes his eyes, and knows that he’s still reaching out to Charles. “But - and this is the most important thing, Charles. The only important thing. Even more so than that I - oh, god, Charles, I should have said so earlier. I love you. _I love you._ You led me out of darkness. You gave me a reason to keep living. You woke me up. 

“Still, having said that - I want you to help me, I need you to help me. It’s your choice to make, Charles. Be with me here, and help me claim World Revolution. Or walk away, to where you want to go, to where you want to be. Or - or do something else. I don’t know. It’s up to you. The choice is yours, I only say it out loud, but that’s always been the truth.

“Choose, Charles - just, do me the favor of letting me know what you’ve decided - ”

He trails off into silence, and the silence is broken by the mocking laughter of Charles’s twin, somewhere behind him.

Warmth beneath his hands, warmth on his mouth, and he knows Charles is kissing him, he knows his hand is on Charles’s heart - just as he knows that Charles’s hand is over his own. Their fingers entwined around the stems of their roses. “Erik,” Charles is saying, again and again.

The voices trail away into an expectant hush.

Erik is suspended on the thread that is Charles, waiting, breathless, when Charles speaks at last, breaking the silence: “You ask me to do something I’ve never done before? You ask me to choose? Then I’ll choose.

“And what I choose, _who_ I choose, is you.

“Give me your heart, Erik! Be with me! _I love you!_ ” Charles’s laughter is startling, and beautiful, and Erik opens his eyes to bright light that illuminates the spaces between them, that chases away the cold of the tomb awaiting them at the other end of the bridge. Charles is incendiary, beautiful, powerful - the truth of a prince is the flame in his blue eyes. “World Revolution isn’t yours, and it isn’t mine - it’s _ours!_ You and me, together!”

The boy who is not Charles suddenly screams: “NO! You are weak, flawed, worthless! You won’t take this from me! _I won’t let you!_ ”

From behind him Erik hears the familiar rasp of steel being drawn - but he’s not afraid at all. 

He smiles, and the happiness that suddenly fills him is more than his heart can bear.

He sees the light in Charles’s eyes, and _knows_ , even before he closes the hand that’s over Charles’s heart around a familiar hilt. Even before Charles smiles, drawing the sword of Erik’s heart.

“Grant us the power to bring World Revolution,” Erik whispers, and he hears Charles’s voice echoing his. 

“Together,” Charles adds, strong and steady and real, in the next breath after they’ve drawn apart. 

The swords in their hands are dissimilar in every way. That to Erik is not the important thing. 

What is important is that these swords be united in their purpose. 

“Together,” Erik repeats.

He turns back, to the tomb and to the empty cage.

The boy who is not Charles is holding a familiar sword: rose on the pommel, golden vine wrapped around the hilt and forming part of the crossguard. His teeth are bared in fury, in fear, and Erik knows this.

Just as he knows Charles is with him, and somehow they’re side by side and running towards the shadow who is their enemy.

Running together, their hearts joined - no longer two, but one - 

The copy of Charles hurtles right into them and the crash of it rattles Erik: it’s something that he can feel in his very bones, pain and the vicious bite of a cutting edge over the knuckles of his free hand. 

“First blood,” the false Charles hisses, beating him back, far too much murderous glee in his blank blue eyes. “This fight is as good as over. I will win. And there will be no World Revolution.”

“You shouldn’t have done that.” The real Charles lunges forward, his sword moving in controlled horizontal sweeps, left and right and left. The next step, however, makes him close in on his copy, and the point of his sword slides in - dark red blood welling up on the bright red uniform, just below the point of the shoulder. 

In the heat of the fight, the real Charles is still cold and calm and beautiful. “Erik is mine and I am his, and no one can get near him who will hurt him!”

The words fill Erik with a nameless, savage joy, that makes him leap back into the fight, that makes him go after the false Charles with renewed ferocity - and he swings his sword, the entire sharp length of it, towards his opponent’s throat - 

**epilogue one: after the revolution**

_I wonder, I wonder, I wonder what I wonder?_

_Something is different about this place._

_Children pass through these doors, and they are changed here, and when they come out they are no longer as they entered. The school changes them._

_And the school changes because of them. The school responds to the laughter and to the tears, to the football matches and to the arts exhibits and to the examinations._

_And it responds to weddings. This is the first one. A wedding that is also a reunion. Here it was that the bride and groom met, and here it is that they will exchange promises of forever._

_A bride and a groom who once wore swords?_

_A bride and a groom who were duelists. Every student whose path she crossed was in awe of her - beautiful, and soldierly, and impeccable in her wit and in her manners. He was in her shadow, briefly, kind and gentle and quietly striving, until he could come into his own._

_That was an important year. We were there. We watched them change. We watched them as they found out about the truth of World Revolution._

_Does anyone really know what World Revolution is?_

_The two who would know, the two who held it in their hands, are not here._

_The two who would know are gone. They are not here. They are not remembered. But the Academy knows what happened. The Academy was only the first place affected. What happened here has spread to everyone, and is spreading everywhere. It only takes time._

_The world is already changing. World Revolution is in the mind, is in the heart._

_Listen to the bells! They are playing a new song. The bride and the groom asked a friend to write this song. It is a song for themselves._

_It is also a song for the ones that they cannot remember._

_But we remember them: the boy who understood what freedom was, and the boy who learned that it was not too late to hope._

**epilogue two: shine together**

_In a quiet room in a quiet place, the pale crepuscular light of the early morning flows soft and tentative through a series of tall and narrow windows, pointed at the top. Faint ideas of colored reflections shift on the floor. Rainbows and shadows, the persistent hum of the world as it warms up, and the soft sounds of sleep._

_The bed has seen better days, and the sheets are faded and threadbare in places. Slippers and books tumbled into a heap next to one of the nightstands. A tortoiseshell tail with a kinked end sticks out from underneath the other nightstand: the rest of the cat cannot be seen, but it can be heard, snuffling to itself as it scrabbles after mice in its dreams._

_Two shapes in the bed; one is more blurred around the edges than the other, owing to being wrapped in a layer of light blankets. The sunlight brings up touches of red and silver in unruly hair: more and more pale strands every year, it seems, falling into a kindly face full of fine lines and multiplying freckles. On the nightstand next to this figure is a book bound in purple leather and more cracks than pages, it seems, and on top of the book is a pair of steel-framed eyeglasses, which catch the rainbows falling into the room._

_The other face is surrounded by close-cropped hair gone almost completely white; only a little black remains at the temples. Even in sleep, there are frown lines persisting between the eyebrows. Restless shifting, as if wandering in strange dreams. Long and lanky limbs, still limber even after all this time, and swordsman’s scars and calluses on the bared hands and forearms. There is a band of pale skin on the fourth finger of the left hand, a faint impression of a long-ago ring._

_In sleep, the two figures seem to drift towards each other. They might pull apart, they might be separated by their thoughts and their dreams, but they always seem to find their way back to each other, though they remain unconscious, wrapped in individual darkness._

_Palm to palm, clasped for warmth and for an anchor, a shelter from the tumult of the subconscious: they always find some way to wake up with their hands joined._

**_fin_ **

**Author's Note:**

> END NOTES:
> 
> > The funeral that Erik participates in involves both cremation and burial, as is followed in certain cultures. At the time of the interment - in this case of the urn containing the ashes of the deceased - the headstone or marker is placed on the grave in the presence of the family, but it is not cemented down until later.
> 
> > Elements of both the Shoujo Kakumei Utena TV series and the Adolescence of Utena movie have been mixed together to create this particular fic. The major difference is this: in this story, there is no Akio-type character and there has never been, meaning that the whole idea of the Rose Groom is entirely different.
> 
> > Cookies to everyone who spots the plot-relevant reference to Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere.
> 
> > Charles reads part of the beginning of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's _Terre des hommes_ , known as _Wind, Sand and Stars_. Very rough translation below:  
>  The earth teaches us more about ourselves than books can. That is because the earth resists us. A man can discover himself when he is faced with an obstacle. But this kind of achievement requires a tool. A plane, perhaps, or a plow. The peasant, in his labor, gradually wrests some secrets from nature, and the truth that emerges is universal. It is the same with the pilot: his tools are the plane and the route that it flies, and with these he confronts age-old problems.


End file.
